


through hardship to the stars

by penhaligon



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Force Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-08-09 04:37:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7787044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke searches for meaning, Lando searches for purpose, and an expedition to a possible location for a future Jedi school gets dicey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The viewport was engulfed by green, a sun-drenched emerald that reminded Lando of Endor. As the  _Falcon_ dipped down through the atmosphere and cleared the clouds, the indistinct mass of color solidified into a canopy, a sea of green that one could imagine went on as long as any ocean. But as Lando leveled them out, jagged masses of dark gray rose up in the distance to break the illusion. The mountain ranges were vast and sprawling, colossal sentinels dominating the horizon, and Lando was struck by the sense of being watched.

It wasn’t just the magnificent sight that sent prickles of _something_ up his spine. The sensation ran deeper in a way that he couldn't begin to identify. It was as if the very air trembled with something buzzing that sank into his skin and into his bones, a fire that didn’t burn and a physical thing that awakened in every corner of his mind and his awareness, full of quivering whispers just past the edge of hearing no matter how much he strained to listen.

Lando couldn’t repress a shiver, reflexively gripping the controls tighter. He glanced to the side. Luke had tensed, his eyes fixed on the distant mountains, and in his gaze, there was something far removed from Lando, from the ship, from anything and everything that Lando considered part of ordinary life. For a moment, with smoldering buzzing under his skin and voiceless whispering in his ears, Lando could see the thing that coursed through him magnified tenfold in Luke, invisible but no less present, augmenting Luke’s being until the man was something more than human.

Then the moment passed and the sensation retreated, folding itself into something less invasive and righting the world with it, as if its curiosity was satisfied. Lando let go of a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding as he saw Luke’s shoulders relax. The inhuman light was gone from Luke’s eyes as if it had never been there.

Lando didn't need to ask what that had been. It was hard not to recognize the Force, even if he'd only just felt it for the first time. He loosened his grip on the controls and tried to laugh, but it left him as another shaky breath. “Do you feel like that all the time?”

“No,” Luke said with a smile, and he leaned forward in the co-pilot's seat to gaze at the planet below them. “It’s just this place. It’s… something,” he finished, failing to find the words, his voice soft with awe.

It was apparently ‘something’ enough to render Luke speechless, and Luke always had something to say. Lando tried not to feel like he was being bested by a planet. When he looked back at the mountains ahead and the forest below, it wasn’t with the same reverence that Luke held. There was still a phantom tingling in Lando’s spine, a wariness that came with being watched. It made him want to leave, to run - an almost physical push that wanted him gone. Or maybe he was just imagining it, shaken by being held in the grip of the Force even for a brief moment.

He got the sense that it wasn’t always such an overwhelming experience, but as Luke had said, it was this place, this planet. Roban had eloquently described it as 'weird' - weird feeling, weird climatological makeup, weird lack of inhabitants despite ideal living conditions. Lando was glad that his chief mining operative had a smart head on her shoulders, for all that the woman was utterly humorless. The expedition team had located an uninhabited planet in a sector that shouldn't have been turning up uninhabited planets at this point, and 'located' was an overstatement. It was more like it had physically appeared in their sight after not showing up on their radars or maps at all, and the only reason they'd even stumbled across it was because they'd had to exit hyperspace to tend to a mild hyperdrive malfunction. After scanning for breathability, they'd landed to investigate for any mining potential and had immediately called everything off when confronted with the strangeness of the place. More foolish individuals might have pursued further exploration out of greed, but Roban had swiftly retreated and reported the incident to Lando instead.

Lando understood what Roban meant by the planet's weird feeling, now. The woman had only been able to describe it in terms of what she knew, and Lando, who had spent enough time around Luke to have an instinct for this sort of thing, had immediately suspected that what Roban and her team had experienced was a planet mired in the Force. 

So he'd called in the only expert he knew, and now he, Luke, and Luke's astromech were making their own expedition.

"What do you think?" Lando asked. They were cruising a couple hundred meters over the canopy below; they wouldn't reach the mountains for a while yet, which spoke to just how massive the forest was. He watched Luke out of the corner of his eye, admiring the other man's profile as Luke was fixated on whatever it was that he could sense. Even though that initial wave of the Force had passed, Lando was fairly certain that he could still feel it - a charge in the air, a physical sensation that practically danced across his skin if he paid it close enough attention, or maybe that was just the restlessness that seemed to have permanently burrowed into him.

"I've never felt anything like this," Luke said; his prosthetic hand was the only part of him fidgeting, betraying his anticipation. "I wonder if the Jedi knew about this place after all."

They hadn't been able to find a mention of the planet in any records or data archives; even Lando's considerable skill in procuring stubborn information had run up against a wall. Much of the information that the Jedi had gathered had been lost to the Empire's efforts to destroy them and all that they had built, suppressing and hoarding what was considered useful by Imperial standards and erasing what was not. Luke had managed a degree of data recovery, some of it with Lando's help, but it wasn't enough. "If they did, it should have been somewhere in Imperial files," Lando reminded him. The Empire would not have passed up a chance to exploit anything and certainly not a place like this.

"Maybe not," said Luke, and a note of distaste entered his voice. "The Emperor had a lot of side projects that were off the record."

Lando didn't ask. He didn't want to know what side projects a Sith got up to.

He could see a hunger in Luke's eyes, tinged with frustration. He knew how important this place could potentially be for Luke, who was making no progress in finding a suitable location for the Jedi school that he wanted to establish. This planet was ideal - strong enough in the Force that even people like Lando could feel it, empty of inhabitants, unclaimed and free of any star system's control as of right now with so much of galactic boundaries still up in the air, and boasting a too-perfect climate that stretched the planet's temperate regions farther than they would ordinarily go. Lando wanted this place to work, too. But he couldn't shake his bad feeling, either, and he knew that Luke was feeling it as well.

Because that was the problem - it was too perfect. Unknown planets with this much resource potential usually showed up much farther out, in the Unknown Regions or in Wild Space. The Empire's crackdown on the Outer Rim should have turned this place up sooner or later. For a long time, gambling had been Lando's professional endeavor, and as a result, he didn't believe in luck. Either it was as Luke was suggesting, that this planet had been known in an unofficial capacity... or something had kept people away from it.

The latter might not have been so bad, if it had just been a matter of the Force somehow shielding this planet from prying eyes and radars. Han used to scoff about that sort of thing partly because it had made him nervous, but Lando wasn't the type to be unnerved like that. Luke certainly had reverence for the Force, and Lando trusted his judgment, if nothing else. But the team he'd partnered with were highly opportunistic, and they'd landed in the mountains ahead and had immediately wanted to leave, spooked by something they couldn't see or smell or hear, only feel.

It gave Lando a very bad feeling.

Of course, it didn't help that all he knew about the Force was what he'd picked up from talking to Luke. He really had to sit Luke down one of these days and get a proper explanation. It may not have spooked him, but he preferred his world to make firm, solid sense, and this Force business always managed to throw that for a loop. The solution to that was to fill in the gaps in his knowledge and not just by asking what the hell that had been every time something strange happened when Luke was present.

The man had a penchant for attracting strange things, and Lando thought about how he had seen, with something other than his eyes, the way that the Force coursed through Luke. He thought that he _ought_ to be frightened by it, by such an unknown factor of which had no real understanding and by Luke’s unfathomable connection to it, but he wasn’t. This was Luke. He had a way of drawing people in, and Lando was no exception to that rule. He often found himself in Luke’s company naturally, like that night after the Battle of Endor - Lando beginning to process the magnitude of the destruction he'd caused and seeking out someone else who could understand, and Luke reeling from what had taken place within the Death Star. And when Lando had learned the truth about everything then, the fact that even Darth Vader had been drawn into Luke's orbit hadn’t surprised him.

He wondered if that was a family thing, recalling the way that Vader’s presence had dominated every room he was in, the way that Leia had commanded so many hearts in the Rebellion and now the New Republic.

Hell, Lando was here, on a two-man one-droid scouting expedition to a place he didn't trust, and it wasn't just because geographical surveying was another skill in his area of expertise or because an uninhabited planet dotted with an array of mountain ranges was every mining investor's dream. Luke had been determined to come here from the moment Lando had relayed what his miners had described, and Lando didn't need to recall Han and Leia bemoaning Luke's habit of rushing off alone to resolve that there was no way he was letting Luke investigate by himself. Luke had a tendency to be reckless with his life, and Lando figured that he would exercise more caution if someone else was around.

It seemed that their friends agreed, seeing as how Han had practically bullied them into taking the _Falcon_ , as if its presence would somehow ensure their safety. Despite the ship's advancing age and seemingly endless array of repairs, Lando was inclined to agree with the superstitious notion. Besides, it was his ship anyway.

Truthfully, this trip gave Lando a break from his own business. He was feeling frayed as of late, one too many tasks that he’d undertaken piled up on top of each other now, started in an effort to fill something that remained frustratingly hollow. It hadn’t given him any sense of normalcy; in fact, it had engendered quite the opposite, making him feel like an ill-fitting piece of machinery, worn down to the point that he couldn’t function smoothly as part of a whole anymore. And now he was stuck with a bunch of duties for the New Republic and investments that he was only half-invested in emotionally, unable to summon up the same sense of dedication that he’d felt towards Cloud City and towards the Rebellion.

It reminded him of his more youthful days, flitting from one thing to another in the grip of both immaturity and necessity, like he’d regressed into someone who couldn’t commit fully, a fragment chasing an elusive sense of wholeness.

Lando shook off these brooding thoughts and glanced at Luke again. "So, are we doing this?" he asked, though he didn't really need to. He knew that Luke would have resolved to carry on the moment they entered the atmosphere and felt the planet's aura.

Luke nodded. "It's worth a look," he said, with feigned casualness. It was a vast understatement; Lando could practically feel his eagerness.

Despite his misgivings about the place, Lando looked forward through the viewport at the mountains ahead and smiled to himself.

* * *

The planet thrummed with the living Force, resonating through Luke’s being with an electric thrill, and some deeper sense of the Force lay under it like a foundation - a cosmic sense, stronger than he'd ever felt it. It was a heady sensation, akin to being slightly tipsy, though Luke was acclimatizing to the feeling the longer he was here. And it felt _good_. The frequent aching in his right arm and the enduring ache from the lightning scars had faded to an occasional twinge, and the shadows that had lingered in his mind for too long now were more like wisps than storm clouds. He felt lighter than he normally did, a little less tired, as if the nameless weight that seemed to have made a permanent home in him had less gravity here.

For once, the feeling of pushing up against something overwhelming, of making very little headway at all in a task that was far, far too big for him, was distant rather than dominating. Just the sense of this planet and its potential made him feel like all he was doing would amount to something in the end.

But there was something else, too, something cold lurking behind the shining warmth of the planet. It was a discordant sensation that set Luke's nerves on edge.

It wasn’t apparent from the look of the place. Ground-level was as breathtaking a view as it was from high above. Upon exiting the ship, all they could do for a moment was stand silently, taking it all in as a light breeze wrapped around them – massive white clouds juxtaposed against a sky so blue it almost hurt the eyes, the nearest towering mountain not a kilometer’s walk away, verdant trees of staggering size on all sides of the mossy clearing that Lando had maneuvered them into. Luke could hear the occasional screech of an animal in the distance and the musical cacophony of a river even closer.

“You know how to find 'em," said Luke admiringly, pulling his gaze away from their surroundings and directing it at Lando. The view was definitely improved by the sight of Lando in his expedition gear set against it. Luke took a moment to appreciate the picture that it made.

Lando grinned in that self-satisfied way that Luke had always found highly distracting. "That _is_ my specialty."

Though Lando was by far the better sight, Luke cast his eyes towards the planet's sun to gauge its position. He figured that there were only about two or three hours left before daylight started to fade. “It’d be better to start tomorrow morning,” he said. “I want to get a feel for this place before we do anything.”

“Meditation?” Lando asked curiously.

Luke nodded. “I’ve been told it’s terribly boring to watch,” he warned.

"Whoever told you that clearly didn’t know how to appreciate a show," Lando said with another grin.

Luke snorted. “I mean, if you _want_ to watch me sit on my ass for a few hours…”

“I think I can find something to do while you’re busy,” Lando said, winking and offering a little salute as he stepped back. “Have fun.”

Luke settled down on a flat, shady area of the mossy ground, folding his legs under him and watching as Lando re-entered the ship and Artoo took up watch near the boarding ramp. For all that he joked about how boring meditation was, Luke was grateful to be able to still himself and give in to the ever-present exhaustion that hadn’t entirely left him, no matter how good this planet felt. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind, but now he was distracted – not just by Lando’s obvious flirting, but by the encroaching sense that something was very, very off about this planet.

This was the kind of place that would easily allow Force ghosts to manifest, and he'd been hoping that his father or one of his mentors would show up, possibly with information about this planet. But Luke had not seen any glimpse of them, and that alone was a warning.

He didn’t really need meditation to know that there was danger here – not close, not yet, but it would be a problem before they left. They'd landed in this particular area, alongside one of the northern mountain ranges, because Luke's basic senses alone had been enough to indicate where the feeling was strongest. The icy grip of the dark side clutched this planet’s heart, secretive and partially concealed by the light that for some reason had not been corrupted, and Luke grew more certain of that with every passing second he was here. He could feel it just barely within reach, a dissonant thrum at odds with the melodic light of this place.

Luke had seen planets touched by the dark side before, and they were nothing like this. The dark was an aberration, corrosive to everything it touched, and it was like a virus, compelled to spread itself in an attempt to draw souls into its path. Even if it worked in secret, it certainly didn't try to condense itself into something that people would steer clear of. And that was what Luke was feeling - a push, an overwhelming sense to stay away. It had driven Lando's team right off of the planet, even if they hadn't known what was compelling them.

This planet, or some creature on it, was hiding something, darkness using light to obscure itself, likely from other darkness that would come to take whatever it was concealing. Luke was determined to find out what it was.

It felt like a singular presence the more he focused on it. He trusted that Lando's high standards wouldn't have let him hire anyone less than competent, and if Lando's team had scanned the planet and found no signs of sentient life, at least on the surface, then Luke was inclined to believe that. He couldn't sense anything of the sort, either, and the ship's scans had only picked up signs of animal and plant life. This planet was well and truly empty of inhabitants, and Luke couldn't shake the feeling that something had gone to great lengths to make sure that it remained that way.

He was suddenly rethinking bringing Lando here for this expedition. It wasn't that he doubted Lando's ability to take care of himself, not when he knew how cautious and pragmatic Lando could be. It was that Luke was much more comfortable risking his own life against some unknown darkness than he was dragging anyone else into it.

He knew that Han and Leia didn't like to see him go off on his own ventures alone, since collecting all that he could of the Jedi and ridding the galaxy of Sith influence still proved dangerous on occasion and often brought him face-to-face with various manifestations dark side, whether that was lingering Imperial sympathies or cursed objects or the like. But they had Ben now, Leia had the New Republic, and Han was loath to leave her side while she juggled those responsibilities. And Luke would rather risk his life repeatedly before he put them in danger, now that they had their own family. He would rather not put anyone in the presence of the dark side that didn't need to be there. He was fine with undertaking these riskier missions by himself, even though he'd gotten more than an earful from both of them about it. 

Lando had come to him, knowing that he was floundering in trying to find a place to house his school and brimming with excitement over finding a planet that could very well work, and now Luke was worried that he'd underestimated the danger that it would put Lando in. The war was only just ended, and he didn't want to drag Lando back into a fight.

Since Luke had begun the tremendous task of rebuilding the Jedi Order from nothing, Lando had stopped by to offer his assistance every now and then. He’d once made his living off of procuring rare goods, and he had a talent for finding things that were hidden away or lost. He knew how to get at information that was supposed to have been deleted or that people were reluctant to give up. He’d been a great help in finding Jedi artifacts more than once. But Lando was a busy man, and there was a difference between dropping by for a day to hack an archive and going on a full-fledged expedition. Luke had been surprised when Lando had offered to put his many affairs on hold to join him on the trip, and he suspected that there was more to it than the fact that Lando could potentially stake a mining claim on the planet - there was always more to it, when Lando was involved.

But Luke hadn't minded. He liked Lando’s company, found himself irresistibly pulled in by the warm and genuine center that Lando liked to obfuscate with charm. Not that Luke minded the charm, either. The other man had an easy way about him, and they shared the quiet understanding of two people who had lived through similar trials - they'd met a crossroads and an upheaval in both of their lives and found kinship in that. Luke would be lying if he said that asking for Lando's assistance in finding some of the easier-to-track Jedi artifacts had been _entirely_ necessary. If it was an excuse to spend time with him, well, he was only rivaled by how many times Lando had shown up with a lead for him without being prompted. But that was an entirely different matter and not the kind that was easy to pursue in between busy work schedules.

Lando had been shifting from venture to venture at the speed of light – here, investing in a mining contract, there, assisting the New Republic in their efforts to make headway against remaining Imperial clutches on various parts of the galaxy, and with a dozen things in between. He moved between business and political endeavors just as fast as Luke moved between Jedi ones, like something was chasing them and would catch up if they stopped for too long.

It seemed like neither of them knew how to function in a post-war galaxy anymore.

Luke feared stopping, feared that he’d never be able to start again if he did – that the cavernous heaviness that had been shadowing him since Cloud City would double down its weight and render him completely motionless, would make all of this seem horribly pointless like it threatened to every other day.

This was one of the first major hurdles, and he'd hit a rut. He'd envisioned a school, less like the rigid structure of the old Jedi Order and more like an open environment meant to foster a connection with others that the Jedi had lost over time. But Luke needed a place for it, and no place was proving just right. The primary Jedi Temple of the old Order had been located on Coruscant, but the Emperor had turned it into his palace when the Old Republic fell, and Luke's skin crawled at the thought of trying to rebuild a temple and a school in a place so marked by evil, by the slaughter of the Jedi. The same thing had pushed him away from the other temples, all of which were ruins now, defaced and marred. He wanted to attend to them in time, to turn them into shrines or at least do something to remove the taint of the Empire, but he didn't want his school to sit on top of that.

Even the older temples that had been abandoned before the rise of the Empire didn't feel quite right. He could rebuild one or more of them, of course, and make something new out of the old, but something pushed him away from that idea, relegated it to more of a last resort.

And even this planet, vibrant and beautiful and empty of both people and the recent history that made the most of the Jedi temples less than appealing, ostensibly the most ideal place that Luke could name, was marked by the dark side.

Luke let these thoughts swirl through his mind as they willed, having learned that trying to keep them away was useless in facilitating a meditative state. Instead, he let his mind roam freely wherever it wanted, allowed his worries filter themselves and trickle out naturally. Gradually, his mind settled, attuning itself to his measured breathing rather than to the anxieties that it normally played home to.

As his mind cleared, his thoughts were replaced with the noiseless hum of the Force, and Luke opened himself to its presence, letting it suffuse him with its warmth. Connecting with it was more than effortless here, and the intoxicating sensation surged forth, making him feel like every cell in his body was charged. It took effort to keep the feeling at bay, to keep himself from sinking into it like one would indulge in alcohol or spice, but Luke’s focus was diligent, and he turned his senses outwards, towards the planet’s Force signature. Searching.

At first, nothing out of the ordinary presented itself. But Luke knew better. He knew that something dark was here and that it was aware of them. He persisted in pushing his senses further, dropping his mental shields, and concentrating his power, making sure that he glowed within the Force – a lure. Maybe he could draw it out, whatever _it_ was. He didn’t think that it would physically emerge; it was too cagey and far away for that. But if it would rise up to meet him within the Force, he could get a better idea of what they were dealing with, so that they wouldn’t go into this unprepared. Maybe he could even try to communicate with it.

He wasn’t remotely prepared when something icy and viselike grabbed him by the throat.

* * *

Lando was hardly aware of getting dinner ready, his hands moving automatically through the familiar motions of preparing military rations. It was by necessity easy and simple food to assemble; they’d deemed it the best choice for an extended trip to an unknown planet, and Lando knew a supplier. The simplicity of the food didn't bother him. Lando wasn't particularly hungry these days, and eating had become more of a chore than anything. Without needing to concentrate on the food, his mind had the freedom to race as it always did lately, his thoughts moving and shifting and refusing to settle into any one focus.

He was thinking about the planet, about the war, about the business deal that he’d foregone to come here and about how freeing that had felt, and every so often he’d move from the galley to the boarding ramp to glance out of the ship and make sure that Luke was where Lando had left him, even though Artoo was keeping vigilant watch. Lando knew that he was paranoid – it was impossible not to be, with the war still fresh – but he’d be damned if he was comfortable with this place enough to let Luke’s not-so-subtle disregard for his own safety get the man hurt. Occasional thoughts of _something_ coming out of trees and attacking drove him towards the boarding ramp every few minutes to be reassured by Artoo’s chirping that all was well, and the rational part of his mind felt absurd. Ah, well – Luke, who was clearly sunk deep into meditation, never had to know. Although maybe Lando would need to speak to the droid about not ratting him out.

Lando finished heating up two portions of the rations and set them aside, and he’d hardly taken a step back when he heard the unmistakable sound of Artoo’s panicked screeching.

Lando was barely conscious of drawing his blaster and dashing for the boarding ramp. Outside, he saw Luke on his knees and bent nearly double, grasping at his throat and choking. Lando cleared the distance between them so fast that he hardly registered it, distantly aware of Artoo on his heels. An awful, sinking despair seized his own throat, because even as he neared Luke, he realized that he had no idea what to do. There wasn’t any enemy that he could see, and he didn’t even know if it _was_ that. It could have been an allergic reaction, for all he knew.

He shoved his blaster back into its holster, dropped to his knees next to Luke, and grabbed the man's shoulder, opening his mouth to ask if Luke could speak. But he didn’t need to. At his touch, Luke started, immediately drew in a shuddering breath, and coughed violently, as if his airways had suddenly cleared. He looked wildly in Lando’s direction, and Lando grabbed his other shoulder firmly but gently.

“Hey, it’s me,” said Lando, and though he tried to keep it soothing, his voice shook. But his fear was ebbing even as he spoke; Luke was breathing again, if in huge gulps, and a fog seemed to be clearing from his eyes the longer he looked at Lando.

Luke stared at him, the intensity of his gaze so strong that Lando felt frozen, and then, when Artoo rolled forward and bumped into him with a worried chirp, all of the tension left Luke’s body at once. He slumped, and a string of Huttese profanity issued forth.

Lando smiled half-heartedly, relief making him feel light-headed, though the smile faded as he ran his eyes over Luke in concern, half-expecting to find some kind of injury. “What _was_ that?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m alright,” said Luke, extending his prosthetic hand to pat Artoo’s dome. He was beginning to look sheepish, and his voice sounded no worse for the wear. “I… underestimated things.”

Lando had very little idea of what he meant by that, but it didn't surprise him in the least. “What did you do?” he asked with a sigh.

Luke grimaced. “There’s definitely something in there.” His head swiveled around to look at the mountain looming over the trees, and Lando shot a glare in that direction. “The dark side has a hold on this planet. It’s something in the mountains. And it already knew we were here, so I thought I would try to draw it out. Not physically,” he added hastily, in response to Lando’s scowl. “It doesn’t want to come out of the mountains. I don’t know why. But I wanted to get a clearer look at its Force signature, that’s all.”

Lando knew where this was heading – this was Luke, after all. “Let me guess: you used yourself as bait.”

Luke looked at once contrite and mildly offended, which told Lando that he was right on the money. “I may have left myself a little too wide open,” Luke admitted.

Artoo offered a disapproving beep, and Lando agreed. “So… what, you gave it an opening, and it _strangled_ you? Through the Force? Across who knows how far a distance?” Lando’s estimation of this planet was rapidly dropping into the negatives.

“It’s not as impressive as it seems,” Luke said, a little mulishly. “I was the one who crossed that distance.”

Lando knew that there was no chance that Luke would back down from this now, not that there ever was. He sighed again. “Did you learn anything else, at least?” Besides the fact that something very evil and powerful was waiting on this planet. Their trip was meant for scouting and surveying, but Lando was beginning to think that they should have come here with an army.

Luke was silent for a moment. “Not much,” he said at last. “I don’t know what it is, but it doesn’t want anyone here. It was trying to scare me away. It’s probably killed everyone who’s ever come here. And…” he frowned in thought, “… tunnels. A _lot_ of tunnels. There must be some kind of network underground. We’ll have to move carefully once we’re down there.” Then he focused on Lando, and once again, Lando felt scarcely able to move under the intensity of it. “This is… different from the war,” Luke said hesitantly, and his searching eyes seemed to be trying to impress onto Lando something that he couldn't find words for. “This isn't Tatooine. This is the dark side. I would understand if you didn’t want to go any further…”

“Not a chance,” Lando said evenly, before Luke had finished trailing off. “You really think I’m going to let you face this thing alone?”

Luke smiled. “No,” he said. “But I _would_ prefer it if you did.”

“Well, that’s bantha shit.” Lando stood up from his crouch and regretted the way he’d leaned back on his heels as tingling shot up his legs. He held out a hand, and Luke took it, the metal of his prosthetic smooth under Lando’s fingers. Artoo bumped against him again, helpfully providing further support, and Luke maneuvered himself to his feet unsteadily, wincing in pain. Once more, he glanced towards the mountain, pensive.

Lando reached out again and lightly tugged on his shoulder. “Come on,” he said, jerking his head towards the _Falcon_. “We can work out the plan over dinner.”

* * *

Shrill alarms rang in Lando’s ears, a furious warning that the hull had taken damage. He ignored them and tried to center his hazy focus on the looming shadow ahead. Time was slipping through his grasp, and he clung to the controls so tightly that his fingers hurt. He was so close. All he had to do was fire, and then this would all be over.

The great shadow grew bigger as Lando poured his concentration into maneuvering his ship, dodging enemy fire and seeking out the weak point that would let him end this once and for all.

It was there. It was right there, and his mind’s eye traced the exact path his laser had to take. He could do this. All he had to do was fire.

He fired, and the Death Star morphed into Cloud City, and then Cloud City was imploding right before his eyes, consumed by an explosion that reduced it to nothing but the void and cracked the transparisteel in front of him, and then the void reached out greedy pressure to swallow him, too, and it was his fault, all his fault…

Lando opened his eyes to find a shadowy figure above him, a figure who dragged him away from the overpowering pull of cold space, and it took all of his willpower not to lash out, stopping himself at the last moment as he realized that it was Luke. It was just Luke. For a few seconds, nothing else made sense, as Lando floated somewhere in a region that wasn’t sleep but wasn’t waking, either, and then it occurred to him that he was in the  _Falcon_ , parked on a planet with some powerful dark side monster lurking under it, and that he’d been dreaming.

“Are you awake?” Luke asked uncertainly.

Lando brought up a hand to rub at his eyes, as Artoo rolled up to the bunk and emitted a soft beep of concern. “Yeah,” he said wearily.

A low light was on, and Lando could see Luke’s hesitation. “You were having a nightmare,” said Luke. “I thought I’d better wake you.”

“Thank you,” Lando said and meant it. That particular nightmare was getting tiresome, and he always felt uniquely awful after waking up from it, but it was better than being stuck in it. He let out a trembling breath and sat up, and Luke placed a hand on the back of his shoulder to help him. Lando liked that feeling. Didn’t matter if it was Luke’s flesh hand or prosthetic one – the proximity made him a little dizzy, in a very good way, and he’d been too worried earlier to appreciate it then. But he did now, letting Luke’s closeness ground him before Luke moved back.

There was a troubled expression on Luke's face, almost guilty, which Lando didn't understand until the other man spoke. “I…” Luke began, then started over. “Sorry, I could… sense what you were seeing. Not images, exactly, but feelings. I wasn’t trying to, it just sort of came through the Force… it’s this place…”

Lando closed his eyes for a moment. He wasn’t overly bothered by that; it wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out what might still haunt his dreams, and Luke would have had an idea anyway. Still, he felt more exposed than he was comfortable with being. This damned planet.

There was a brief, heavy silence, Lando too wrapped up in his thoughts and in the remaining clutches of sleep to want to form words. But Luke was fidgety, and finally, he ventured to speak again. “Why didn’t you go back?”

It took Lando a moment to work out that he meant Bespin, and he stared at nothing in particular as the question sank into him. Cloud City was still there, free of Imperial control thanks to Lobot and under his guidance now, and he certainly could go back. Lando thought about his old friend, about how he'd failed Lobot before, and that was the thing, wasn't it? He didn’t even know how to answer. Didn’t know how to explain that he hadn’t truly experienced real stability until he’d settled in Cloud City, how a place that had started out as nothing more than a gamble had become so much more to him. How the blow of losing it, failing it, was a weight that he still didn’t know how to shed. It wasn’t like the war and its aftermath had really given him the space to shed it. Or like he’d given himself the space, he thought ruefully.

“Sorry,” Luke said again, fiddling with his metal hand. “Don’t answer that. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Lando pulled himself out of his reverie and realized that he must have remained quiet for too long. He shook his head, his eyes on the prosthetic. “It’s okay,” he said. It wasn’t like his life was currently overflowing with people who asked that sort of thing, anyway. He just didn’t want to give any kind of real answer, even though he thought that Luke might understand better than most. Might even be able to help.

Bespin was a ghost for Luke, too, and something had shifted for him, had healed - his prosthetic was skinless now, a deliberate choice, and he carried it with a quiet sort of pride and comfort, a far cry from the way he'd hunched over the wound in this same ship more than two years ago.

But Lando balked and searched for an easy thing to say. “... You just can’t go back to some things.”

Luke nodded, not pushing the issue, but he offered Lando a small, encouraging smile. “It was out of your control, you know,” he said. Lando had heard similar sentiments from him before, back then, because Luke was the kind of person who reserved his grudges for select people. “No one’s fault but Vader’s.”

Lando sighed heavily. “Yeah, I know,” he said, and he did, logically. Emotionally was an entirely different matter. And that was exactly the problem – control. He liked things to be firmly in his control, where he could make sure that everything worked like it was supposed to. Even in gambling, it wasn't a matter of luck, not if you were a professional - it was knowing your opponents, if you had any, and a fair amount of setting up the situation so that you _could_ control it. Cheating, in other words. But lately, it felt like he was even playing catch-up with his own life instead of controlling it, like he was a teenager again. Maybe that was really why this planet rubbed him the wrong way. He couldn’t even comfort himself with the delusion that he could control his surroundings here.

Dwelling on that made him feel worse. It was definitely time to change the subject.

Lando eyed Luke critically, taking in his appearance. “Did you sleep at all?” He got the sense that it was still nighttime outside, but he must have slept for several hours at this point.

Luke didn't quite meet Lando's eyes. “… No,” he admitted.

There were any number of reasons for that, but Lando didn’t push the issue, either. “Sleep,” he said. “I’m awake now. I’ll keep an eye on things.” He didn’t really need to; they had Artoo for that. But there was no way that he was going back to sleep tonight.

Luke nodded, and Lando was surprised that he gave in so easily. However, Luke hesitated. “Are you sure you’re alright?” he asked.

“I’m  _fine_ ,” Lando said, but he didn’t really mind the question. He shooed Luke towards another bunk and then ducked out of the crew quarters before any more awkward conversation could ensue, Artoo trailing behind him.

The droid had certainly warmed up to Lando in the past few years. Artoo took personal offense to anyone who so much as looked at Luke funny, and so Lando had initially been on the receiving end of the Artoo's righteous indignation for a while. But the droid tended to follow the example of his master, and Luke was full of an astonishing amount of forgiveness. As Lando took a seat in the cockpit, Artoo positioned himself next to him, determined to assist him in keeping watch. Lando patted Artoo’s dome affectionately; the droid wasn’t the only one who’d developed an appreciation over time.

"Got any good holos?" Lando asked. He could do with a distraction.

Artoo chirped and showed him a selection, but it only took Lando a second of looking through them to know that he'd never be able to focus on them, anyway. He sighed and shook his head, and Artoo withdrew the projection.

There were still a couple of hours left before daylight, Lando estimated, assessing the surrounding environment with a quick scan. It wasn't nearly enough for Luke to get a proper rest. Lando rolled his eyes and was acutely aware of the fact that he was no better, really. It felt ridiculous to be hung up on things that were more than two years in the past, and yet here he was, staring at nothing and brooding in the  _Millennium Falcon_  in the middle of the night. Which was no doubt the same thing that Luke had been doing.

Some pair they made. Lando smiled, comforted by that, and he turned his thoughts towards the morning and the dangerous task ahead of them, brooding on that instead as he waited for daylight.


	2. Chapter 2

The trek up to the mountain tired Lando out more than he cared to admit, his pack of supplies digging into his shoulders and making them ache. He'd spent a long time mining atmosphere, and he'd forgotten how mountains had a tendency to seem closer than they actually were, with surrounding ground that inclined in a furtive fashion and only made you aware of it when your legs prematurely began to burn from the effort of crossing it, no matter how fit you were. If he was going to establish a mine here, he'd have to get used to mountain terrain again.

That was, if they managed to free this planet from the dark side that lurked somewhere within it. Lando wasn't exactly feeling pessimistic about that, but he _was_ feeling more and more like the planet didn't want them there. Luke had described it as the effect of the dark entity that lived here, that it was trying to push them away and make them leave before they could get at whatever it coveted. But within an hour of leaving the _Falcon_ , they had an unpleasant encounter with some truly alarming insects that surged out of the trees around them. The insects were several times larger than those on any other breathable planet, a complement to the enormity of the trees and to the fact everything seemed bigger on this planet, and they clearly had hostile intentions, until Luke sent a warning through the Force that had them scurrying.

Lando thought that it was a particularly apt welcome party.

This, at least, was something that he had an idea about. It couldn't have been the atmospheric makeup enabling the insects and the trees to reach those sizes, not when it was breathable for humans. But this planet was steeped in concentrated Force energy, so much that the very existence of everything in it was _more_ , every tree and rock and particle of air more present and alive and connected in some immense way that could not be expressed, only felt. It was a likely explanation for the size of everything here, and it raised a whole host of questions about how the Force could affect life if a place was highly Force-sensitive - questions that neither Lando nor Luke could answer. Force-sensitive species existed, Luke knew, but he couldn't say much beyond that yet. If either of them were going to set up shop here one day, they’d need to understand how the planet functioned.

The rest of the walk to whatever was calling to Luke was uneventful, however, and they talked about other things as they made their way through the trees, occasionally stopping to help Artoo get past tougher ground. They talked about how a dinner party thrown by one of Lando's colleagues had gone hilariously wrong when a flaming dish had caught a table on fire, about how little Ben, not even a toddler yet, was already showing signs of Force-sensitivity, about how the galaxy had a long way to go before it could truly settle in the wake of Imperial surrender. Lost in conversation and the concentration required to pick his way across uneven forest floor, Lando almost forgot his bad feeling.

He remembered it when the forest gave way to open ground at the foot of the mountain.

The village lay between mountain and forest, long-abandoned but large enough to house hundreds of people and sprawled beneath an entrance carved into the mountainside. The aged, crumbling, vine-and-moss-covered stone buildings clustered in a semi-circle around what looked like a small temple, and the sight of it increased Lando's sense of being unwelcome here, far more than the insects did. With their green coating of layered vegetation and the tall sea of wild grass that had grown up around them, obscuring their measured symmetry, the buildings could have almost been mistaken for rock outcroppings. There was a ghostly emptiness to the place; it had not been disturbed for an unfathomably long amount of time. Lando could feel that fact trembling in the air.

Luke's senses had unerringly taken them right up to the stone village, as he followed an instinct that he could only describe as something he needed to find. This particular something wasn’t malicious, he’d said, and Lando trusted him on that. The village made him uneasy, but it didn't seem evil to him - just sad, in the nostalgic way that very old things were. A sense of loss settled in his chest as they explored it, Luke using his lightsaber to cut a path through the tangled grass, and the feeling was personal enough that Lando thought it must have come through the Force, as if the stones themselves were reaching out for whoever had shaped them. Alongside that was the unease that came with the knowledge that people had lived here without leaving a record anywhere else in the galaxy, at least not one that he’d been able to find. Information could be lost to time, Lando knew, but something told him that this planet wasn’t abandoned because its people had left.

The temple was too overgrown to enter easily, and they passed it by, choosing instead to make their way up the steep, winding path behind it that led towards the mountain entrance. Luke's senses drew him in that direction, and Lando was beginning to feel it as well - the mysterious sensation of being pulled forward that went head-to-head with the dark side's push, and it wasn't just his own cautious curiosity.

The entrance was the opening of a tunnel, on a ledge that sat atop a set of winding steps that had crumbled into a jagged mound. It was less of a walk and more of a climb, and Luke had to levitate Artoo with the Force to get the droid up, much to Artoo's disgruntlement. Lando thought that there must have been a gate marking the entrance at some point, but it wasn't there anymore, and the sides had weathered away so much that it had become more of a lopsided hole. The entrance was totally open, like a yawning mouth.

Lando remembered the way that the thing in the mountains had reached far enough through the Force to attack Luke and recalled Luke's mention of tunnels, and he reassured himself that his blaster was in easy reach.

As they entered, Luke ignited his lightsaber, its fiery green light serving the function of a glowrod as the outside light slowly receded behind them. The noise of the outside faded as well, until the only sounds were their footsteps and Artoo’s rolling tread and the crackling hum of the lightsaber. The tunnel ran straight and sloped downward, the lightsaber illuminating its hewn walls, and as they walked in silence, Lando thought about the insects and the village and the fact that they were just two people and a droid heading to face something that had likely killed everyone who’d ever set foot on this planet for too long.

He’d spoken to Luke about it yesterday evening while they were eating and while Luke still looked a little ashen from his experience, mentioning the possibility of coming back with the cavalry. Leia would have been more than happy to get them a unit from what was left of the New Republic’s standing army, and Lando knew that the surviving members of the Red and Gold Squadrons would jump at the chance to help, even though they were retired.

But Luke merely shook his head. “Numbers won’t matter,” he said.

“I think they could help,” said Lando, frowning across the dejarik table at him.

Luke shook his head again and lapsed into momentary silence, looking thoughtful. “What would happen,” he said at last, “if we brought twenty soldiers, and this thing attacked them all at once using the Force, something they don’t know how to fight? I’d have to split my attention twenty ways to protect them, and I’d still have to protect myself. I’m good, but I’m not _that_ good.”

Lando stared as the words sank into him. He hadn’t thought about it that way, that ordinary people might be a danger to Luke when he was confronting something outside the realm of ordinary. He'd just assumed that it was entirely Luke's obstinacy at work. He remembered Luke giving him an out, a chance to walk away from this, and his heart sank.

“Am I making this harder for you?” he asked abruptly.

Luke looked at him in bafflement, and then realization sank in. He went red, color finally flooding back into his still-too-pale face, nearly knocking over his drink as he shifted self-consciously. “No!” he said hastily. “I wasn’t… that wasn’t a hint, I was just giving an example. I can protect one person.”

“So I’m just here for you to protect,” said Lando, and he tried not to sound bitter.

Luke winced. “No,” he said again, more steadily, and he met Lando's gaze with earnest intent. “Look at what just happened. That thing overwhelmed me, and you cut through its influence like it was nothing.” Lando had been under the impression that he hadn’t really done anything in that scenario, and the revelation otherwise had him silent for a few moments. “And you found this place. All of this would be so much harder without you."

Lando regarded him silently, feeling oddly pleased. He regretted making assumptions about why Luke preferred to do these kinds of things alone, but Luke's insistence was heartfelt, and Lando felt his own heart speeding up a little. He didn't really know what to say, so he narrowed his eyes and folded his arms, letting Luke squirm under his gaze a bit. “But you’d rather I didn’t come with you.” The statement was only slightly accusatory.

“ _Well_ ,” said Luke, very pointedly, “I would prefer if you stayed safe because _you_ were concerned about _your own_ well-being.”

Lando considered this and wanted to laugh at the absurdity of Luke, of all people, encouraging self-preservation – to Lando, no less, who had volunteered to lead the Death Star strike. Lando leaned forward, elbows on the table, to give Luke his best crooked, charming grin. “Oh, come on, you know that’s not how we do things.”

Luke’s face went a little red again, and he sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

And so they were here under the mountain, and now Lando was thinking about _that_ and about the insects and the stone village, and it took him a moment to realize that the tunnel was getting lighter.

The light was emanating from somewhere up ahead, a soft, shifting glow of yellow and pink and purple that grew brighter and danced on the walls the further they went along, accompanied by the sound of running water. Luke extinguished his lightsaber but still kept a tight grip on the hilt, and Lando drew his blaster. They slowed their pace, creeping forward as Artoo brought up the rear, until they reached the abrupt end of the tunnel.

Every question, every misgiving, every thought left Lando’s mind as he stared, slack-jawed.

His first impression, as a languid flow of air hit his face and the echo of running water amplified, was one of immense size and unnatural openness. The cavern before them was colossal, its ceiling so high that it vanished into soft gray darkness above. They stood at an opening in its curved southern wall, and at the far end of the cavern, other tunnel openings were located along the walls. A sweeping staircase lay at their feet, leading down to a what could only be described as a small city nestled within the cavern.

Lando gazed at it, once again struck by a sense of time – the expansive sense of immeasurable and ancient time, which was easy to forget when one could hop across the galaxy through hyperlanes. It was the same as the village outside, but something was off about it, something that he couldn't immediately place.

At the city’s center was what seemed to be a temple, a larger version of the one outside and the largest building in the city, around which the other buildings and a network of small man-made streams were oriented in a circular pattern. The place was almost entirely carved from stone, all sweeping arches and catenary curves and artful, masterful design, a magnificent window looking back at what the outer village had once been. But that was only half of the breathtaking view.

The crystals were twice the size of him and jutted out of the ground, tetragonal and hexagonal in shape, shining with their own internal light in an array of yellows and pinks and purples and setting the whole cavern aglow. There were stone carvings around them, and they were dotted about the city, directing its design as much as the central temple. He didn’t need to be a Jedi to know that these were the Force in solid form, the reason why this planet burned so strongly and brightly that anyone could feel it. Their power was palpable from where he stood, the effervescent feeling of the planet outside strengthened several times over.

Lando stared and stared and was only drawn out of his awe by Artoo’s insistent whirring. He stirred and glanced over at Luke, who was similarly entranced. Luke shook himself and tore his eyes away from the sight in front of them, smiling down at Artoo, who was very impatient about wanting them to get on with it.

“Alright, alright,” he said, shifting his shoulders to make his supply pack rest more comfortably on them. “We’re going.”

They had to go down the steps slowly for Artoo’s sake, but Lando didn’t mind. It gave him time to take in the aerial view of the place as they descended. “Luke,” he said, a little breathlessly. “Think you could use this place?” He was already considering how many credits premade tunnels might save him if there was anything worth mining in these mountains. It was jumping ahead – they had no real idea of whether any endeavor here would be sustainable or not, and he knew how much survey and investigation was required to calculate that for an unknown planet – but Lando was too caught up in the moment to care.

“This is perfect,” Luke said softly. "Artoo? You pick up on anything yet?"

Artoo paused in his cautious descent to beep and offer up an incomplete list - kyanite, tungsten, goethite, iron, and a 'scan in progress' notification that indicated that there was more to be processed by the droid's preliminary scans for nearby deposits and ores.

"Think you could use that?" Luke said to Lando, with a grin that Lando matched.

They didn’t say anything further, preoccupied with staring again as they got closer to the bottom of the steps. Lando was trying to take everything in – not just what his eyes could see, but what some nameless extra sense could feel. There was something intoxicating about the air of this place. He could feel the Force pulsing through it, and it was in him, too. He’d never been so aware of that until now. It quivered under his skin like a living thing, reaching out to all other things as it did. He was aware of the way it coiled around and through Luke, the way it sang from the crystals, the way it even wrapped itself around the stones and Artoo.

Once down, they made their way into the city itself. The steps gave way to a short road that branched off into several narrow paths that one could take around and through the city, and they chose the central path, making for the heart of the place.

As they walked, some of Lando’s elation began to fade as he remembered that there was still a presence in these mountains that had to be dealt with. He'd returned his blaster to its holster as they'd descended into the city, but he kept a wary hand resting on it nonetheless. Among the buildings outside and in the tunnel, he’d been expecting to find bones or old tools or something aside from the buildings themselves to indicate that people had once lived and died here. There had been nothing, and there was nothing here as well. The stone city was completely empty of personal touch, as if time had eroded any and all belongings and left only skeletal construction in its wake. But dust had hardly touched the place, he realized, as they walked down empty streets and passed open doorways. There was no sense of decay here, no evidence of the erosion of time, not like the weathered and overgrown village outside. He finally understood why the sense of time here felt so strange.

It was eerie enough that a chill ran up his spine, banishing much of the warmth that had settled in him when they’d reached the cavern. The chill did not dissipate after a while. It remained steady, a warning.

“I feel it,” Luke said quietly, when Lando glanced at him.

Luke did not immediately set off to go and find whatever dark side creature was hidden away somewhere in the mountain range. Instead, he led them to the temple.

It was the crown jewel of the stone city, similar in design to the rest of it but larger and more intricate. Aside from symbols carved into the stone, the rest of the city had little decoration and had clearly been designed only with utility in mind, but the temple was inlaid with markings that shimmered in pale gold and silver and blue. Lando eyed it all appreciatively as they entered. The people who’d lived here had truly been architecturally inclined. Lando knew the difficulty of working with stone, which was why people hardly bothered with it now in an age of durasteel and other metal alloys. He wondered if the former inhabitants had used the Force to help them construct the buildings and tunnels; the city and the cavern certainly gave the impression that they had been touched by something otherworldly.

The interior of the temple was just as desolate and clean as the rest of the city – no trappings, no signs of having been lived in. Lando shivered and followed as Luke headed directly for the enormous crystal situated in the center of the temple’s main room, which was otherwise empty aside from further designs on its walls that sparkled in the light. The crystal was a hexagonal giant that shone bright yellow-gold, larger than the others outside. Its pulsing energy could be plainly felt, filling the room with its warmth. Lando and Artoo hovered near Luke, watchful, as Luke crouched down at the base of the crystal, running his hands over the low stone carving that encircled it. A few centimeters of some kind of metal pipe was visible, held in place by the stone and sunk into the ground, where it ran off in different directions under raised stone covering. Luke rapped on the exposed part of the pipe with his prosthetic hand and received a solid sound in return.

“A conductor,” Lando said in realization.

Luke let his hand rest on the pipe. “They used them for energy,” he murmured, a look of fascination on his face. It was another thing that could save a fortune if they could figure out how to work whatever system was in place. Luke stood and examined the crystal, his head tilted up to inspect its full length. The light danced over him, immersing him in gold, and Lando imagined that it was alive, welcoming him. “I’m not sure if this is a kyber crystal.” Lando didn't need to ask; he’d helped Luke to track down some black market lightsabers a couple of months ago. “I’d have to study it,” Luke continued, and he turned back to Lando, looking disappointed that he couldn't. “But there’s no time for that. There are more.”

“More of these crystals?”

Luke jerked his head in the direction of the northwest corner of the city. “All over, but there’s a big cluster that way. It’s the strongest.” He shrugged the supply pack off of his back and left it near the crystal.

Lando didn’t question how he knew it, following suit and setting his pack down next to Luke’s. “That’s where we’ll find our friend,” he said grimly. He was beginning to understand why the creature wanted to remain undisturbed and alone here. There was a network of power under the mountains, so alive and strong that Lando could feel it and tap into it as easily as he could use his normal senses. He had only been thinking in terms of how it could make his and Luke’s future endeavors here easier, but there could be any number of sinister reasons for the creature’s presence on this planet, all centered around the crystals.

They set off again, leaving the temple and moving cautiously through the empty streets as they wound their way northwest. The chill still had not left Lando’s spine. In fact, it seemed to have grown stronger, a cold that shot through the warmth of the Force like lightning. “How far is this cluster?” he asked. His own sense of the Force was too new to be that refined; all he was aware of was a lot of power coursing through these mountains, not the particulars of where its sources were. But anticipation was beginning to grate on him, the unbearable sense of knowing that something bad was coming and having to wait for it.

“Pretty far,” Luke said. “We'll have to go through the other tunnels. But something tells me we won’t have to go all the way.”

They had nearly reached the far end of the city, and the gaping northwest tunnel beckoned them, a black hole in the softly lit cavern wall. Lando grimaced as they neared it, imagining all sorts of horrors that could lay in that direction, and then something caught his eye, moving just within his peripheral vision.

Lando whipped his head around and came to a sharp halt, feeling Artoo bump into his legs with an indignant squawk. For a second, Lando thought that he was surely hallucinating. He saw a tall figure several meters away, bathed in flickering blue light. The figure seemed to be straining, pushing against some invisible force as if tearing an unseen curtain open. It looked like a weak holo, coming in and out of focus and winking in and out of existence.

Then the figure solidified as if with a great effort, winning against whatever was attempting to hold it back, and it strode forward with powerful, purposeful steps.

It was a man, and he looked vaguely familiar, though Lando could swear that he’d never seen that face before. Lando couldn’t tell if he was middle-aged or younger; there was an ageless quality to him, not helped by the fact that his features were carved out of spectral, wispy blue light. He had a thunderous expression on his face, the kind that would make people shrink before him. Some part of Lando shouted at himself to react to this obvious threat, to aim his blaster and _do_ something, but a greater part of him wasn’t afraid.

“Where is my son?” the man demanded in a voice that reverberated, looming over him, and in a flash Lando understood why he wasn’t afraid of this man, which was a truly bizarre turn of events.

Lando stood very still for a moment, processing the fact that this was Darth Vader’s spirit standing in front of him, exactly as how Luke had once described him, and then he actually registered what Vader had said.

He spun around so fast that his neck hurt, as Artoo rolled around him and wailed. Lando stared at the spot a couple of steps ahead of him where Luke should have been, dread curling in his gut and nausea leaping into his throat, and he cast his eyes about frantically, seeing nothing but empty cavern.

“Luke!” he yelled, heartsick fear cracking his voice, but it was useless.

Luke was gone, vanished as if he had never been there.


	3. Chapter 3

As they walked through the cavern, Luke kept his mind as tightly gathered as he could, trying to fixate both on the Force signature of the cluster further in and on the malicious presence that seemed to be ahead and not there at all and everywhere at once. The creature’s grip was strong here, sunk deep into this place over millennia, and it had the advantage. It was trying to confuse him and keep him from pinpointing its location. Not that it really mattered; Luke knew that it would emerge to keep them from going near its favored cluster, as soon as it figured out their intent. But he also knew that he wouldn’t be able to best it while he was skulking behind his own mental shields.

It was a weakness of his. Leia had already surpassed him when it came to mental shielding, her political training serving her well when it came to the Force; she could lock her mind down tightly, and nothing could get in or out. Luke, meanwhile, found it difficult to keep things from leaking out and to shut himself off from the world around him – especially when he needed to be able to sense something beyond him, as was the case here. He’d never really been able to achieve the necessary balance between keeping himself open enough to use his senses but also making sure that he was well-guarded. He worked best when he didn't have to worry about that, when he could pour all of his focus and power into something outside of him.

It left him vulnerable to mental attack, but he wondered if he'd really have a choice here. The creature's Force signature was different from a normal living thing, unlike the sentient creatures that Luke was used to - much more _there_ within the Force, as if it wasn't restricted by physical form. The more Luke considered it, the more it felt like the Force signatures of the spirits of his father and mentors, except that it was corrupted, seething with festering evil. He didn't know if it was a ghost as well or some avatar of the dark side, but whatever it was, it was strong enough that he didn't think his shielding ability could stand up to it. The only way that Luke could hope to match up was through raw power.

He had that in spades. He didn't like to use it, but he had it. The trick would be using it without leaving himself totally vulnerable as well.

His preferred method was talk first, attack second, but he'd already tried that, and all he'd gotten was the terror of having his airways constricted by a phantom grip. Still, if this thing was a ghost lingering in the Force, he'd much rather try to help it to move on than fight it, if only to reduce the risk to himself and Lando. But he didn't think he'd get what he wanted. Malice permeated the mountains, a malevolent and discordant thrum, strong enough that he felt the acrid taste of it in his throat. When he'd tangled with the creature earlier, Luke had felt the lives that it had taken, their fear and despair and loss strengthening the creature's twisted presence, as if it had absorbed all of that into itself.

Luke knew that there was a fight ahead, whether he wanted it or not. As they headed for the northwest tunnel, he deliberated with himself for a moment and then reached further, casting his mind out as cautiously as he could. It was a risk, but he needed to be able to lock on to the creature. The greater risk was allowing it to attack them physically without Luke knowing where it was coming from.

Something shifted, and he knew it instantaneously. He took another step, not far from the tunnel, and a sense of wrongness enveloped him so rapidly and totally that it nearly stole his breath. Luke stopped as something else fleetingly brushed up against his senses, something familiar that vanished just as quickly, but he had no time to consider it.

He turned, heart pounding, and saw no one.

No Lando, no Artoo, nothing but a silent cavern that seemed much more shadowed now, its enormity devouring rather than awe-inspiring.

 _No._ An immediate despair gripped him, dredged up from some dark place that was suddenly all too close to the surface, and for a moment, all that Luke was aware of the numbing, accusatory sense that it was happening again.

But he tore himself away from it, grimacing and clenching a metal fist in an effort to ground himself. The feel of his prosthetic was wrong, the pressure of his fist not all the way there. This was a trick. The sense of the Force was wrong now, too; it was corrupt, not physical and real and full of life in the way that he knew so well. Most importantly, Luke couldn’t feel the enduring physical ache that had become a part of him at Bespin and the second Death Star, and that more than anything told him that he was no longer firmly connected to his own body. He was seeing something inside his own head, or inside the creature’s head, or both. He wasn’t totally unprepared this time, and even though the creature had managed to get to him a second time, he _knew_ it. He could work with that.

A searing heat roared up behind him, wind and sparks surging around him, and Luke spun around again, instinctive panic shaking his resolve.

He saw his childhood home on Tatooine, black smoke billowing around it as flames licked the bodies of his aunt and uncle. The heat was almost intolerable, the smell washed over him with another gust of sparking wind, and Luke wanted to throw up, wanted to drop to his knees in horror. _This isn’t real_ , he reminded himself, retching on the smoke, but then it was the fire of a lightsaber cutting into Ben, _this isn’t real,_  and then it was laser fire consuming Biggs above the Death Star, _this isn't-_ , and then it was his father, pyre fire tinged with lightning breaking free of its wooden confines to swallow the planet and everyone on it, too, all of his friends caught in its wrath. And then the mountain around Luke was burning with Lando still in it, the forest outside was burning, even the stone of the village and the city was melting, his future and the mountain itself crumbling under the onslaught of a mighty fire that burned Luke’s entire life down around him, devouring it in fiery nothingness.

He fell to his knees as a horrible, cavernous numbness stole his strength from him. “I’m sorry,” he choked out in a sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” He couldn’t do anything, could only watch, immobilized, as the great weight that had been following him for years won out at last and rendered him helpless, and everyone he loved and everything he’d worked for burned.

* * *

Lando knew about the ghosts that lingered in the Force. He’d learned a lot that night on Endor, he and Luke both all too willing to spill their guts as the shock and the achingly fresh experiences built up into something unbearable. This was exactly how Luke had described his father and mentors – deep misty blue, not quite all the way there and not quite solid, but very real to eyes that could see them. Luke had been the only one, at the time. Lando suspected that Leia had gotten to that point quickly, though she never talked about it.

And now he could see them, on this planet so alive in the Force.

Lando shoved aside all of his shock, all of his confusion, all of his fear, shoved them deep into a corner of his mind so that he could free up the rest of it and think quickly, and he looked back at Vader’s spirit, bracing himself. “You can’t sense him?” he asked. He couldn’t; there was a void where Luke should have been. But he didn’t know what Force ghosts were capable of.

Vader's expression had a dangerous edge, but it wasn't directed at Lando. “No,” said the ghost, and then he disappeared for a moment before winking back to life, exactly like a holo with a bad signal. He came back with a snarl of frustration on his face, and Lando could feel the Force bending around the spirit, a push-pull of some invisible battle. Vader was straining to push his way into this world from wherever he came from, and something - the creature - was trying to push him back. “The shadow’s hold on this place is too strong,” Vader said through gritted teeth, clearly attempting to maintain surface calm. There was an echo overlaying his voice, as if he was speaking from two places at once. “It must have taken him. I’ve been trying to break through to warn you, but…” he disappeared and reappeared again, looking furious, “... I wasn't able to do anything until it was distracted.”

Another chill ran up Lando’s spine, deeper than the one before – a painful, biting cold that sapped at his strength with ferocity. He didn’t need Vader’s focus shifting to a point over his shoulder to know that _something_ had entered the cavern, from the tunnel towards which they’d been headed.

Lando’s stomach dropped as he turned. All he could see were chaotic living shadows, darker than the darkest smoke and shot through with a blood red glow. They coiled out of the tunnel entrance and rose high in the air, and it took him a moment to work out that they had a form: a monstrous, writhing form that didn’t hold steady, so that it was many things, many dark inversions of natural forms all at once. It was growing to fill the cavern from bottom to top, hissing at a pitch that drove painfully into his ears.  _I’m dead,_ Lando thought, going numb, and some part of him knew that it was the effect of the creature, inducing a sense of hopelessness. He could feel its intent. It wanted him dead, and he couldn’t fight that. His blaster would be useless, and he wasn’t a Jedi.

He saw Vader’s hand extend, felt an enormous surge of power, and two other blue figures winked into existence in front of the shadow, one of them tall and the other less than half its height. “Hold it off!” Vader bellowed.

Then Lando felt a strange pressure on his shoulders, not quite solid but able to touch nonetheless, as Vader turned him around, gazing at him intently. It was so much like Luke that Lando felt a stirring of life in him again, breaking through whatever draining influence the shadow was exerting. He could see Vader’s entire form trembling now, as if under an even bigger strain.

"It isn't at full power right now," Vader said urgently. "It's distracted, trying to subdue Luke. It feeds off of those attuned to the Force. It doesn’t want to do the same to you, it wants to kill you. But that is how you can beat it. You are an unknown variable to it. If you can get into its mind, it will try to attack you like it attacks Force-sensitives, and that will fail. You may have enough time to pull Luke out of its grasp.” 

Lando nodded, trying to steady his breath. He buried the instinctive _how can you be sure?_ and instead asked, “How do I do that?”

He could have sworn that he saw a flash of approval in Vader’s eyes. “I believe you have some understanding of the Force,” said Vader. “You can use it here." He paused, and though he clearly tried to master the flicker of doubt that crossed his face, Lando saw it nonetheless. "If the shadow has Luke, then you will have go through it to get to him. Connect with it through the Force. If you can get it to respond to you, it will try to trap you in your own head.” The ghost flickered, but remained, shaking so much that it made Lando’s eyes hurt. “It must be using Luke's own power to conceal him. He may very well be in this room, and we just can’t see or feel him. Get past its tricks and connect with Luke through the Force, and the illusion will shatter. Use your will.”

A wave of sheer impossibility threatened to drown Lando - there were far too many 'ifs' in those directions - but he nodded again. He was all too aware that he was attempting to use a power that he barely understood and trusting the words of someone he really had no reason to trust, but he closed his eyes, shut out the sounds of the creature's keening, and tried to do as Vader had described.

He imagined reaching out, extending a mental hand to that unidentifiable other sense that he'd felt since they'd landed here, and it was easier than he'd thought it would be. He could feel himself connecting to the pulsating sense of the Force around him, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and it sang in welcome. It didn't take much to connect to cold void of the creature next, whose presence ran through the Force like poison. But Lando understood what Vader had meant, when he'd said that it wasn't at full power. The shadow's presence was weaker than it should be; its main focus was elsewhere, preoccupied with Luke and with the Force ghosts preventing it from reaching Lando, and so it was vulnerable.

Luke could plant suggestions in weaker minds, but Lando doubted that he'd be able to do the same to the shadow. However, he already had an idea of how to get it to do what he wanted, and it didn't need to be anything as fancy as a mind trick. He pushed against the shadow's presence, resisting the urge to recoil from the repulsive sensation of its buzzing malevolence, and he kept pushing, as persistently and annoyingly as he could.

For a second, he feared that the shadow wouldn't respond. But then he felt its curiosity and irritation turn on him. Lando pushed again in challenge and aggression, making his intent to never stop quite clear, and a hideous sensation of _wrong_ enveloped him as the creature decided to meet his challenge.

He felt a shift, and his world was plunged into total darkness.

Lando closed his eyes, giving himself the impression that he was the one who’d made it so dark, and slowly, he counted to three, measuring his breaths with it. This was absurd its cruelty. He’d forgotten his childhood fear of the dark, but it surged to the surface violently now, because the shadow could dig that deep into his head. How was he supposed to beat something that could do that?

Physical illusions were just tricks of light, Lando reminded himself, and any in his head were going to be even less than that. He just had to outthink them.

He reached out a hand and almost immediately hit a solid wall. Further exploration made him think that he was in another tunnel.

A pitch black tunnel. He needed light.

 _Use your will,_ Vader had said, and the strangeness of taking advice from and trusting Darth Vader, dead or alive, hit Lando again. But he brushed that thought aside, reminding himself that they had something in common now. Lando tried to concentrate, but that had become much harder these days, and when he opened his eyes, he found no difference. Cold despair pulled at him, trying to drag him down into even darker places, but he closed his eyes again and steeled himself. He thought about the electric green of Luke’s lightsaber illuminating the tunnel that had led them here.

When he opened his eyes again, the same hue lit the tunnel, this time with no visible source.

Lando took a deep breath and examined his surroundings. The tunnel was smooth and featureless, and in both directions, it led off into complete darkness. How was he supposed to know which way to go? What if he picked the wrong path? Anything could be waiting for him if he did, any horrors that the shadow pulled from the cracks in his mind that he'd tried so hard to ineffectively fill in.

He couldn't do this. He didn't even know how long it would take to find Luke or if he'd be dead before he could. The only thing standing between him and death was the Force ghosts, and Darth Vader himself was struggling against the shadow's power.

Lando stood there in the grip of indecision, unable to settle on a direction with the knowledge that the wrong path could get him killed and leave Luke in the hands of a monster, and then it occurred to him that this was _his_ head. Not the shadow’s. It was only intruding. This was his head, and he was the one who decided things here.

_Use your will._

Lando picked a direction at random and began walking.

Soon enough, the tunnel branched off into other tunnels, all of them identical and swathed in the same darkness. Lando stopped as thoughts of impossibility and wrong choices reached greedy hands for him once more, and he spent a minute reminding himself once again that this was his head. It wasn’t about picking the right path, because the shadow wouldn’t have created one. They would all be wrong paths, if Lando let them. He just had to _make_ one into the right one and use it to find Luke’s Force signature. Same thing as card-playing, really. If you wanted to win, you didn’t wait for the chance; you made that chance, with a card or two up your sleeve.

Lando picked another direction and kept walking, taking random turns when divergent paths presented themselves and focusing only on the task at hand. It wasn't long before the air grew thicker and thicker, harder to move through. Lando found himself having to concentrate just on his steps, forcing one foot in front of the other and shoving himself forward, and he could feel that earlier malevolence trying to bend around him and propel his fear and despair to the forefront. Unbidden thoughts of Cloud City and Lobot flashed before his eyes, cutting through his chest with almost physical force - Cloud City overrun, Lobot in a bacta tank, and for a moment, it was as if he was back there, dark tunnels giving way to hallucinations so real that Lando thought he could touch them. He faltered, his breath leaving him in a shaky gasp, and he tried to close his eyes and block the images, but it was like they were burned onto his eyelids as well. He couldn't shut them out.

But he didn't need to, he reminded himself. None of this was real, and this was _his_ head. His lips curled back in defiance. "I know my baggage, thanks," he spat out.

The hallucinations faded, and the tunnels returned.

Though enormous strength drove the creature's attacks, they hit at all of the wrong angles, not quite able to sink into the darkest corners of his mind, and Lando squared his shoulders and kept walking. Vader had been right. This thing had no idea how to mentally attack non-Force-sensitives. It only increased Lando's determination, his certainty. There was only one reason why the shadow would be trying so hard to stop him.

In between his steps, he focused on Luke, remembering the way the man had felt in the Force and reaching for that same distinct signature.

The green light around him grew brighter.

* * *

Luke didn’t know how long he’d stared at the flames, devoid of energy and will and feeling. The scene seemed to stretch on into infinity, unchanging. He’d been here forever or scarcely a minute – it was impossible to tell.

But presently, something in him begged him to move. It was something important, some information that had slipped his mind, and for a moment, he considered just letting it pass by. Reaching for it was too hard, when his limbs and his heart were as heavy as lead. However, urgency cloaked it, and it wasn’t just the information that was important. There was something else, something he had to do. Some _one_ he had to protect, he realized with a jolt.

So he focused, pushing against the impossible weight that had driven him to the ground, and even though it took gargantuan effort to reach that piece of awareness that floated tantalizingly close, it hit him like a cold shock when he did.

_This isn’t real._

He was trapped inside his own head by a creature of the dark side, and _this wasn’t real._

Luke tried to stagger to his feet, and once again, the weight pushed him down. He let out a sound that was half a sob and half a snarl and tried again, but he was just so _tired_. Every bit of strength he called up to get through every day was gone, because the creature was in his head, amplifying every fault line, every crack that it could find.

But Luke gritted his teeth and tried again, thinking about Lando, who had come here with him to the planet that could one day be home to the Jedi school he dreamed of. Luke remembered the school, and he remembered that Lando had wanted to help him make it a reality. Lando had wanted to come despite the danger.

He had to get out, he had to get back. With the return of his awareness came a sudden understanding of the creature – Luke was in its head as much as it was in his. He understood with horrifying clarity that when he'd felt the lives that the creature had taken, it hadn't just been an echo of the past reaching him. It had also been pieces of souls, of awareness still living, that were _in_ the creature, Force-sensitive individuals that it had attacked and immobilized and then absorbed power from, draining their life and Force energy to bolster itself. It had drained the people who’d lived here and Jedi who had come investigating long ago, and in the meantime, it lived off of the crystals and their power, a continuous source of energy for it. But it was greedy, a part of the all-consuming dark side that never stopped hungering. It wanted him and his power, and like a fool, he hadn’t shielded himself nearly enough to keep it from getting to him.

It wasn’t interested in Luke's physical death yet, but it would kill Lando if Luke didn’t get back to himself and kill it first.

 _If Lando isn’t already dead._ The thought came with a vengeance, trying to drive him down even further, and Luke felt his resolve slipping in the face of a grief that wanted to bend him to the ground. He clung to what he knew – the creature was trying to break him, make him weak enough that it could keep him trapped and feed off of him. There was just as much of a chance that Lando was still alive. He told himself this over and over until the thought lessened.

With agonizingly slow effort, Luke mustered himself and climbed to his feet, every movement of muscle and sinew a fight, and as he rose, he could feel the creature's fury and shock resonating through him. It wasn't used to its victims fighting back. Savage satisfaction at its anger drove Luke the rest of the way up, but he stopped again when he was on his feet and went still as death, taking in the fire that surrounded him on all sides. He still had to figure out how to get back to himself, he still had to fight his way out of his own head against the creature’s influence, he still had a physical fight ahead. And Lando could be dead for all he knew. It was so much, too much, and that awful heaviness doubled down. He didn’t even know the way out.

Then he heard his name.

He didn't react much at first. He thought that he must have imagined it, or that it was another trick of the creature. But it came again, insistent and clearer than the discordant chaos that wrapped around Luke. A pure note amid the turmoil, and Luke's heart was pulled towards it without even trying.

Lando. It was Lando, a warm and real and very much alive presence in the Force that Luke instinctively knew was no trick. It couldn't be, not when Luke had come to know that aura so well. The sense of Lando was distant, but getting closer every second. Somehow, he must have entered and gotten through the creature’s mind through sheer force of will; something about him was confounding the creature’s influence and cutting through the dissonance. Luke could feel the creature's anger in reaction, the way that it was trying to split its attention between both of them and weakening itself as a result.

Luke turned in the direction from which Lando’s voice was coming. He could see a shadowy figure through the flames, and he knew the way out. He listened to his name in Lando's voice, and it was easier to move, the weight on him a little less heavy.

But Luke hesitated, staring at the fire that seemed all too real, as doubts and fears wrapped cold, sickly fingers around him, now whispering false promises of safety. They warned him that what he was looking at was nothing more than a shade meant to trick him, was something far worse than the images of death that still flickered around him. He was safer here behind the flames, the whispers said.

It was a lie. No creature of the dark side could mimic Lando's warmth like that, nor imitate the dazzling presence of his aura, and Luke was more certain of that than he was of most things.

Lando was going to need him. Luke took a breath and stepped into the fire.

It didn’t hurt, didn’t even touch him. He was in Lando’s arms a second later, as the figure solidified and lunged for him, dragging him away from the flames. Impressions of Lando’s thoughts came to Luke, all overshadowed by urgency and concentrated on a getting back to the physical world, and they stumbled through darkness, the flames replaced with a winding maze of pitch black tunnels. Luke knew that this wasn’t real either, that it was all happening inside his head and now Lando’s too. Their minds had connected through the Force, and it was manifested in the way that Lando clung to him and he clung back. But it felt real and solid and warm, and in between Lando's urgent thoughts, there was something shining bright as day, unconcealed, that Luke did not have the time or presence of mind to consider.

And then Luke was sprawled on the floor against the wall of the cavern, next to the northwest tunnel entrance.

He was on his feet a second later, igniting his lightsaber. He saw the creature’s semi-physical form, all writhing, roiling, titanic shadows tinged red that formed some hideously shapeless mass – it came with a sense of void, of life twisted and corrupt, and he was all too aware of the souls trapped within it. He saw Ben and Yoda’s flickering blue forms in front of it, and he saw his father ahead, crouched near Artoo and Lando’s collapsed form.

Luke took a step towards them, his heart in his throat, and then he felt it, a rapid shuddering of air that told him that something very, very bad was coming. He was conscious of Anakin yelling his name, of Ben and Yoda suddenly right next to him, their blue auras wrapping around him and shielding him, of a concussive blast of energy that knocked him off of his feet, and then he was conscious of nothing at all.


	4. Chapter 4

Pain hauled Luke into wakefulness, consciousness returning to him in pieces of bone-deep hurt. There was hard stone under his back, uncomfortable and cold, and everything hurt like something had deliberately targeted old wounds. The stump on his right arm throbbed with renewed vigor, the lightning scars felt like they were freshly acquired, and he wanted to curl up on the stone beneath him and waste the day away.

But awareness came on pain’s heels, and then Luke hardly had any room in his mind to spare for injury, or for the ghosts and the droid that were looking down at him in concern, as there was only one thought that propelled him up.

“Lando,” he gasped, and getting to his feet _hurt_ , but he did it lightning-quick. “Where…” He looked around wildly, and the emptiness of the area hit him like a punch to the gut. Artoo whistled in consternation, further confirming what he already knew. “Where is he?” Luke demanded, turning on the spirits.

“The shadow took him,” said Anakin, his face twisted in regret. Luke had been expecting as much, but hearing it said aloud nearly sent him back to the ground as a wave of dizzy fury and guilt hit him. “I tried to stop it, but… it overwhelmed me. I’m sorry, Luke.”

“It overwhelmed all of us,” said Ben. Or… Obi-Wan, Luke thought; it was strange, thinking of him as Ben when Luke had a nephew now. “You made it quite angry when you escaped.”

Luke dropped his head into his hands, rubbing his aching forehead. The sense of connecting with Lando through the Force was still fresh, and the sudden loss of his presence felt like a gaping wound. Luke knew why the shadow hadn’t just killed Lando, and he knew that it wouldn’t kill him right away. No – it had taken him as bait. Its malicious intent lingered in the Force, challenging him. It wanted to draw Luke further into its domain, where it was concentrating its power, drawing all of that power close to itself instead of blanketing the planet with it. It made the rest of the planet feel lighter in comparison, as if the air had cleared, but that didn't ease Luke's fears at all. It just meant that the shadow would be stronger when he confronted it again. “I didn’t escape,” he said quietly. “Lando got me out.”

Luke was the one who’d made a mess of things by underestimating just how far the shadow could reach into his mind. Lando had saved him and now was in danger because of that. Luke was aware that he’d likely be much worse off than dead if he’d come alone. He hadn’t forgotten the souls that he’d sensed trapped within the shadow; he could have become one of them if Lando and the ghosts hadn't been here. The sensation of being drained by the shadow was still fresh, too, and nausea churned in his stomach at the thought of being permanently caught in that endless loop of despair. He had to free them. Free them, and get to Lando before the shadow killed him, and kill the shadow, and figure out how to do all of that without getting sucked back under the shadow's influence, and-

He cut that train of thought off as firmly as he could, tempering his worry and guilt and fear; he couldn’t afford to wallow in that when he needed to act. One thing at a time.

Luke looked down at Artoo's questioning chirp and realized that, from the droid's point of view, he'd been talking to thin air again. "Yeah," he said. "They're here." Though Artoo couldn't detect ghosts, he was willing to accept that Luke could, after Luke had explained that it was like the Force projecting a holo in a manner similar to Artoo's own projections. He'd been surprised by the droid's acceptance, but then again, Artoo had seen a lot. Perhaps someone talking to ghosts wasn't the strangest thing that the droid had witnessed over the years.

Luke saw the hilt of his lightsaber lying several meters away and called it to him with the Force, then nearly jumped out of his skin when the three spirits winked out of existence. They reappeared a few moments later, Anakin faster than the other two, and Luke stared.

“Strong, the shadow’s power here is,” Yoda said, shaking his head. “Much difficulty there is in manifesting.”

Luke nodded; he’d suspected as much, when none of them had appeared to him earlier. He glanced over the saber hilt to inspect it for damage and found it intact. When he ignited it, the blade hummed to life like it always did, and he extinguished it with relief, putting it back in his belt. “Do you think you can get close to it again?” he asked. He almost didn’t want to hear the answer – the plan already formulating in his mind was dependent on being able to use his full power without fear of the shadow getting into his head again. He knew he was weak against the shadow’s mental attacks, and if he hoped to go toe-to-toe with it physically, an external shield would be the safest option.

None of the spirits responded at first, glancing at each other uneasily. “I don’t know how much we can help you,” Obi-Wan said at last, gravely. “It may have the advantage now that it’s expecting us.”

Luke nodded, taking a breath and trying to mitigate his disappointment. But he hardly had a chance to consider the fact that he needed a new plan when Anakin spoke. “I can,” his father said suddenly, with iron certainty. “I can do it.” Anakin inclined his head to Luke. “I have an advantage as well.”

Luke smiled at him gratefully. Their family had been the first thing that Anakin had told him about, the first time he had appeared after Endor, during one of Luke's sleepless nights - the fragment of the Force tree in Luke's possession allowing Anakin to manifest more easily. He'd told Luke to take his sister to Naboo to discover more about their mother and her family and had described their grandmother and his own mysterious origins. That had been a little hard for Luke to wrap his head around, but one thing was clear: the Force was strong in their family for a reason. Even in death, Anakin didn’t have as much difficulty as his mentors did in appearing to Luke in places that weren’t as attuned to the Force. He could manage it from time to time, and sometimes Luke wondered if, despite all of the misery that their line had endured, the Force favored them.

 _I sure hope you do,_ he said, to the ever-present warmth that hummed beneath his skin. _I’m going to need it._

“If I’m going to fight it,” he said aloud, “I have to be able to do that without worrying that it’ll get into my head again.” He knew now that being Force-sensitive made him vulnerable to it, regardless of his lack of skill in shielding himself, though that didn't help matters. “Can you keep it from doing that?”

Anakin considered it for a moment. “I believe so,” he said, and he met Luke's gaze uncertainly. “As long as you do not mind me being in your head instead.”

Luke smiled at him again. “I don’t.” He looked at his mentors. “Do you know what this thing is?”

“A spirit,” said Yoda, “summoned by the Force users who lived here long ago. Good intent, corrupted. And lingering far past its time, it is, with the power of the crystals. Know anything beyond that, we do not. Concealed for a reason, this planet was. Lost facing the shadow, Jedi were.”

“So you just let it be?”

Yoda shrugged. “Before my time, that was," he said, and Luke was again struck by just how old this place was. "Made that decision, I did not.”

“Sometimes it is safer to leave things well enough alone,” Obi-Wan said pointedly. “The shadow will not leave the planet, and as long as no one comes here, it cannot harm anyone.”

Luke pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, as if that could stave off his headache. “Would’ve been nice to know all of this before we came here.”

“Realize you intended to come here, we did not,” Yoda said dryly, “until too late, it was.”

Luke shivered when he remembered the sense of despair and loss contained within the shadow, that of the souls that it had drained and killed. He’d already known that Jedi had come here, had been able to glean that from the shadow's mind, but if the Jedi Order had considered this place dangerous enough to leave it alone, even when it had killed their own… he was just one person.

“The Jedi who came here long ago did not have the help of ghosts,” Obi-Wan said, with a small smile. "Nor did they bring their non-Jedi friends. Perhaps that was their mistake – _our_ mistake.”

Luke's emotions must have been blaring through the Force, with him too tired to manage them, but he didn't bother trying to rein them in. There was something else beneath Obi-Wan's words, something that Luke could sense - almost like apology, and it was then that he realized that neither of his mentors had tried to deter him from going after the shadow, from going after Lando. They were regarding him with more faith than he felt, and it was both heartening and disconcerting. All of the ghosts were waiting on him to make the calls, and Luke was once again reminded that he was the last living Jedi, with Leia rejecting the path in favor of her parents' legacy.

The thought just made him more tired, but he offered a half-hearted smile and nodded. "Alright," he said, taking a steadying breath. "I think I know how to do this." He knelt down next to Artoo, resting his prosthetic on the astromech’s dome. “I could use your help,” he said. “If you’re willing to go down there with me.”

Artoo chirped assurance that he was ready for anything, and Luke smiled again. “I know you are."

They made an odd party - Luke setting off with a droid and three Force ghosts in tow. They entered the northwest tunnel, and the glow of the spirits illuminated the path, immersing the perfectly hewn stone in their spectral blue hue. Luke followed the pulsing sense of the strongest cluster of crystals, where the shadow lurked and where Lando was sure to be, and it guided him unerringly when the tunnel began to branch off into an interconnected network, all of them as superbly carved as the temple city. The previous inhabitants had most certainly used the Force to carve their home within the mountain. And that was important for Luke. That precedent meant that it could be done.

He spoke as they walked, laying out a rough sketch of his plan. “The shadow will kill Lando if I get too close," he said. "So I can’t be the first person to show up." Artoo beeped, and Luke nodded. “I need you to distract it. Anakin will protect you while you do.”

Luke glanced at his father, and Anakin gave him a tiny nod of assent, smiling rather sadly when Artoo beeped again in greeting. "Hello, Artoo," Anakin said quietly, though the droid couldn't hear him.

"He says hello," Luke said to the droid. "And that he misses you."

Anakin's mouth twitched as Artoo trilled in shared sentiment.

The tunnel forked into two divergent ones, and Luke veered right without needing to think about it. It felt like the only thing he was sure about, right now. “And then I need to get to Lando first,” he continued, troubled. "Before the shadow does." This was what he had feared – the life of someone he loved depending on his timing, his power, doing it exactly right the first time, in a situation much more delicate and time-sensitive than Tatooine. He would have to shield himself well enough to prevent the shadow from noticing his approach and his use of the Force, and he knew that he could only manage that level of concealment up to a point. After that, he'd have to be fast enough - he'd have to get himself in between the shadow and Lando before it had a chance to hurt Lando.

Lando could already be in bad shape, and that thought was enough to throw Luke off and consume him with worry. He couldn't glean any sense of it from the Force and tried to tell himself that it was unlikely. The shadow didn’t bother with physical maiming, preferring to attack the mind, and Lando had already thrown it off twice, his sharp mind lending him an ease that not everyone would have been able to achieve. He didn't have the same wide-open and well-tread Force pathways in his mind that Luke did, that left Luke so vulnerable to the shadow's mental assault. There was every chance that he would be fine, that the shadow couldn't and wouldn't do him any lasting harm.

But if it did...

Some dark instinct welled within Luke, and he let it pass over him - didn't embrace it, didn't fight it, simply let it be. That was where the ghosts around him had gone wrong, he knew. 

He would not act out of vengeful instinct - no matter what, he had to put an end to the shadow anyway, because it was still hurting the people it had hurt long ago.

But regardless... if the shadow hurt Lando, that would be its last mistake.

Luke picked up the pace, ignoring the way that it sharpened the dull aches in his body by a degree. He was already tired, and he didn’t know if this constant exhaustion was because of old injuries, or if it was mental, or some dreadful mixture of both, but it was really beginning to hit him in earnest now. It was getting worse the further they walked through the tunnel, the sense of cold malevolence thickening in the air and weighing him down and darkening his thoughts, and sometimes he thought he saw fire licking the corners of his vision. It was not an ideal condition to fight in.

He would just have to trust that the Force would give him the strength he needed, when the time came.

Luke finished explaining his plan in detail, refining it as the ghosts offered their advice and explained to him what had occurred while he’d been under the shadow’s influence. As they walked, he strained his senses to make a mental map of the tunnels that crisscrossed the range. If this was going to work, he’d need to understand the place as intimately as possible, including weak points and points that he could exploit without caving the rest of the place in. That consumed his concentration, and silence had fallen for some time when the spirits began to flicker again, much more violently and his mentors more so.

“The shadow’s influence,” Obi-Wan said with difficulty, straining to remain present. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to manifest.”

But Anakin frowned. After a moment, he solidified more than the other two, and Luke could feel the Force bending to his father's will. Anakin nodded to Luke, a silent promise that he wasn't going anywhere.

Luke looked at his mentors; he'd hoped that they could stay with him, but he got the sense that it wouldn't be possible after a few more steps. “Go back,” he said. “Don’t waste your energy. If I fail, I’ll need you to go to Leia. Tell her to keep people away from this planet. _Don’t_ let her come here. Tell her anything you have to. Tell her to think about her family, the Republic, anything. Tell her that people need her.” There was only so much that a ghost could do, especially when up against Leia’s stubborn nature, but Luke hoped that the enormity of the shadow’s danger could be impressed on her. They were evenly matched in power, and if he couldn’t defeat it, he feared what would happen to his sister if she tried. He just hoped that her pragmatism would win out against any impulsivity and desire for vengeance, if it came to that.

The ghosts nodded, regarding him gravely. Obi-Wan's face softened in pride. “You are the best of us all, Luke," he said quietly. "A far better Jedi than I could have dreamed. If there is anyone who could do what so many of us could not, it is you."

Luke had no answer to that. He nodded, unable to speak for a moment.

“Stand a chance, I think you do,” Yoda added, with much less obvious sentimentality, but there was a confidence in his voice that Luke had no answer to, either.

Luke inclined his head to them in respect, slightly overwhelmed. “Thank you,” he said, finding his voice, and then he smiled. “I’ll see you later, one way or another.” Next to him, Anakin frowned.

Obi-Wan and Yoda disappeared, leaving only Luke, his father, and their droid to continue on. Anakin fell into step beside Luke, and there was silence between them for a while. The tunnels were somewhat darker with the absence of the other ghosts' light, but Anakin shone with determination, power radiating from him in a way that eased some of Luke's worries about the task ahead.

“You are very calm,” Anakin observed eventually.

Luke didn’t feel calm, but he was trying to find the tranquil center that he needed, to let the Force ease some of his aches and to keep his Force signature tightly contained and masked, so that it didn't spill over in anxiety and alert the shadow to his presence the closer he got. It was working, then. “I hope so."

Anakin glanced at him. Luke could tell that something was bothering him. “Do you not fear death?”

Luke looked straight ahead as they rounded a curve. It was a heavy question, one that weighed down his every step, and he knew that Anakin was fishing for something. “Not mine,” he said at last, which was mostly true. He was getting better about that, but it wasn't easy.

“You were the same on the Death Star,” Anakin said, and a note of awkwardness had entered his voice, letting Luke know that his father was trying to approach a topic that he found difficult. “Do you have so little regard for your own life?”

Luke winced. He'd had a feeling that Anakin was heading in that direction. In the few times that Anakin had appeared to him, it was as if he was trying to get as much parenting into the encounters as he could. Luke didn't exactly mind that, when it was any other topic. “If I do,” he said, more sharply than he intended, “that’s my business.” He regretted the words as soon as they left him and Anakin frowned. “Look,” Luke continued, finally looking at his father, “that’s… not a helpful thing to be talking about right now. Can we talk about something else?”

“Of course,” Anakin said, a little too fast, and Luke held back a sigh, even though it was what he'd wanted. Truthfully, he preferred his father's clumsy attempts at parenting to that kind of eager to please behavior.

Luke reconsidered that stance when Anakin spoke again, hesitant but determined to break the silence. “This man…” said Anakin in curiosity. “Lando. I remember him.” He grew somber immediately, regret crossing his face, but then he looked at Luke, and his expression lightened. “You two seem close.”

Oh, hells. They were not going down this road, no matter what parenting his father wanted to do. Luke kept his gaze fixed ahead of him, wishing that Anakin would go back to silence and wishing that he himself wasn't so damn bad at concealing his emotions. He didn't wonder how Anakin had come to that conclusion. “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Anakin smile. “So…” his father said expectantly, “how close?”

“ _Also_ my business.”

But this was far safer territory, and Anakin persisted. “I like him,” said Anakin. “Strong mind. Brave. Few people ever had the nerve to turn on me. Or yell at me.” He paused. “ _You_ like him.”

This was quickly sliding into the surreal, and a slightly off-kilter laugh escaped Luke, bitter and humorless. “A lot of good that does if I get him killed.”

Anakin grew somber again. “You won’t,” he said, with quiet conviction. “And that is not on you.”

“Isn’t it? I knew this would be dangerous.”

When Anakin responded, there was an edge to his voice. “I destroyed the lives of the people I loved,” he said, and Luke finally looked at him again, startled by the frankness of the statement. “That was on me. I do not think the people you love could ever say the same about you.” Anakin knew what he was doing; it was much harder to argue against such a comparison, and Luke had to concede the point. Anakin's voice softened. “And as long as you did not bring him here at blaster-point, then Lando is here because he wanted to be. Because he loves you. He could not have saved you from the shadow if he didn’t. You are not responsible for his choices.”

Luke looked down at the ground, watching as his and Artoo’s shadows danced in his father’s flickering blue light. Anakin was right, of course, and Luke knew that the guilt twisting his mind into knots was not really himself talking, either. But there was a difference between understanding something and feeling it. And it didn't change the fact that Lando was still here for him and that Luke had failed him. Luke remembered promising that he could keep Lando safe, and his stomach twisted.

At the very least, he hadn't failed completely yet. He had a chance to save Lando, and then after... well, he was beginning to think that this wasn't the only way he'd failed.

He’d never been quite sure of how Lando felt. The man was charming and flirtatious with practically everyone, and he wore that like armor. He flirted with Luke every now and then, but something seemed to be holding him back. Lando wasn't in the habit of sticking around lately, and Luke hadn't known if that, too, was armor, was meant to keep him at a distance. And yet, maybe Luke’s hesitation hadn’t been rationality talking, after all. Maybe it had been one of the cracks in his mind, telling him that someone like Lando couldn’t be interested and trying to swallow up another good thing in his life.

Because there had been something in Lando’s thoughts that the man hadn’t tried to hide. Luke hadn’t had the time to consider it, but now, as he thought back, he remembered the way that Lando’s warmth had wrapped around him when their minds had connected it, brimming with a kind of feeling that Luke knew all too well, mirroring his own in both its strength and its hesitancy.

Luke wanted to groan. He really had made a mess of things in more ways than one. He nodded, unable to summon up the will to speak, and felt his father's ghostly hand on his shoulder – not quite a touch, but a pressure, an energy.

“You can do this,” Anakin said.

And Luke believed him.

* * *

Of all of the things that Lando had expected on this trip, boredom wasn’t one of them.

And yet here he was, curled up against the wall of a much smaller cavern that was even more dazzling than the last one, and his only options for entertainment were to stare at the giant multicolored crystals in the cavern’s center and to wallow in the draining, overbearing influence of the shadow wrapped around them.

He could, of course, stare at the shadow as well, its formless presence all too good at drawing the eye, but if he did so for too long, he felt like he was being sucked into a black hole of desolation, an ancient build-up of stolen despair that left him shaking and nauseated. So he avoided that.

Lando didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious or how long he’d been here, but it had been long enough that his mind was sinking further and further into the disarray that the shadow wanted him in, bereft of anything else to focus on. The only interesting thing that had happened had been his attempts to get away, and since those had ended with him being thrown painfully back, he wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

He just had to wait for Luke to show up, he reminded himself. Wait and try to keep the shadow out of his head. He knew that Luke would do everything in his power to come for him.

 _If Luke isn’t dead,_ a treacherous part of his mind whispered, and Lando eloquently told it to shut up. If Luke was dead, Lando wouldn’t be here. He knew he was the bait. The shadow had wanted to take the fight to a place where it was stronger, unwilling to face Luke when he also had a couple of Force ghosts on his side. It was more of an ‘attack when the enemy is unprepared’ kind of monster.

It was disconcerting to be able to understand the creature’s motivations that well, but Lando had joined minds with it briefly. It must’ve come with the territory.

It _burned_ to know that he was the bait, a sense of powerlessness that cut him to the core. Hadn’t he been worried about this exact thing – ending up as a danger to Luke? It made Lando furious enough to want to fight the thing himself. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d beaten the thing mentally, even if it could overpower him physically. And the shadow knew it, too. Maybe that was why it would hiss at him occasionally.

“Fuck you too,” Lando said once when it did that, and it was a useless gesture, but it made him feel better.

However, that small defiance wasn’t enough to keep an encroaching misery out of his mind. For all that the shadow couldn't get into Lando's head the way it had gotten into Luke's, it was still powerful, and he could still feel its influence wearing away at him, chipping at his defenses. He knew that the heavy feeling of despondency was being artificially induced, but he was tired and hurt, and all of the strength that he’d summoned to hold himself together in the past few years felt flimsy and weak and not at all enough, now. It was as if he’d used the last of it in the mazes of his mind that the shadow had created, and now he had precious little left to defend himself. There was no fighting back right now; there was only weathering it.

Lando tried to think about all of the things that he hadn’t yet done and wanted to do all over the galaxy, and about Luke showing up, but instead, thoughts of Luke dying at the creature’s hands became more insistent, along with regret that wrapped itself around him as jealously as the shadow clung to the crystals. He and regret were old friends, the feeling as familiar as the controls of a starship. He'd certainly been indulging himself with it lately, and with restlessness, too. A little too much, maybe.

It wasn't like him, not anymore. But it was like the war had done something to him. Like it had twisted him about, set him on a path going backwards instead of forwards.

Lando tried to push past the darkness that the shadow was inflicting on him, past thoughts of failure magnified tenfold from their usual quiet noise. He thought about how the war was over, how he'd had a direct hand in that. He thought about the fledgling New Republic and his hand in that, too. And Cloud City was alright; she'd bounced back with Lobot leading the way, even though Lando had never found a way to make things right for him again.

He remembered how it had felt to connect with Luke through the Force - all of that warmth and light, that giddy sense of shared wavelength eclipsed by fear and desperation. He was reminded of Cloud City, of Luke collapsing into his arms then, too, but this time, they had not been strangers, and Luke’s feelings had bled through the Force, open and easy and not at all what Lando had been expecting.

Not all of Lando's regret was particularly dire.

He knew that he hadn't exactly been direct, that he hadn't let himself stay in Luke's company long enough to indicate that he really wanted to take Luke out for dinner sometime and _not_ in the context of work. Flirting here and there didn't cut it. He knew better than that.

If they survived this, he’d have to fix that. No more convincing himself otherwise.

They wouldn't survive this, Lando's mind insisted again. He was as good as dead, and Luke would be subsumed by the shadow, and there would be no chance to fix anything.

It was an exhausting cycle, those thoughts magnified in his head by the shadow until he tried to think around them until they were magnified again, but it was easier to deal with when Lando stared at the crystals, ignoring the shadow wrapped covetously around them. They were some of the most beautiful things that Lando had ever seen – almost three times the size of the ones in the stone city, their light soft but nonetheless radiant, in an array of every color imaginable. It was clear that the cavern had been carved around them - as a place for worship, Lando thought, feeling some ancient intent lingering in the air, and he understood why. The Force flowed from the crystals freely and joyously, and when Lando focused on it, his bruises hurt a little less and it was easier to steel his mind against the shadow.

The crystals were untouched by the shadow’s darkness; it wasn’t so much doing something to them as it was drawing power from them, from what Lando could tell, and the fact that even all of that malice and misery couldn’t infect them was heartening. It made him think that he stood a chance, too. So he gazed at the crystals, and the misery was a little less abject, a little easier to bear.

Lando was pulled out of his musings entirely when he saw Artoo roll through the gaping hole of the cavern entrance on the opposite end.

He stared, not entirely sure if he was seeing things right, and then Artoo began emitting high-pitched beeps and whirs, flashing his lights and generally causing a disturbance. The shadow turned what Lando assumed was its face in Artoo’s direction, and Lando flinched as it shot out a long tendril to swipe at the droid… and was repelled, as if it had hit an invisible wall directly in front of Artoo. The droid's shrill beeping took on a smug air.

A delighted smile tugged at the corners of Lando’s mouth, as Artoo kept up his annoying display and kept rolling forward, and the shadow’s wispy arm kept bouncing back when it lashed out. Finally, with a screech, the shadow detached itself from the cluster and crawled forward, assuming the vague and loosely defined shape of some predatory mammal, trying to reach the astromech. Artoo began rolling backwards, drawing the creature further out, and Lando resisted the urge to laugh.

The urge left him abruptly when the shadow abandoned its fixation on Artoo, who was almost back at the entrance, and spun around to face Lando in a way that sent a chill up Lando's spine. The shadow emitted a cry that shook the cavern and sent pain vibrating through his teeth. It dove forward, its murderous intent more than evident, but Lando only had a second of fearing for his life, because the wall near him exploded outward with a burst of the Force.

Not a pebble of debris touched him, all of it arcing unnaturally so that it landed several meters away. Lando grinned when Luke climbed out of the crude hole he’d blasted. Luke raised a hand and was nearly pushed back into the hole from the force of holding the creature back with whatever invisible shield he’d tossed up, but his face twisted in determination and he gave a great shove. The shadow stumbled back halfway across the cavern, screeching in fury.

Luke turned to give Lando a, “Hi,” and in the shifting light of the crystals, Lando could see that he was sweating and shaking. Whatever Luke had done to get here was surely excessive, and Lando was at once touched and concerned.

“You didn’t want to give it another year or two before you showed up?” Lando said teasingly, trying to get his feet under him and using the wall for support to maneuver himself up. Luke reached out to offer him a prosthetic hand, and Lando took it, wincing as he got to his feet with Luke's help.

“Sorry,” Luke said, as he let go of Lando's hand and then stalked protectively in front of him like an angry Loth-cat, bracing himself and igniting his lightsaber as the shadow abandoned its animalistic form and gathered itself to its full, shapeless height, dwarfing them. “I had to circle around and carve a detour to reach you undetected. It took a while.”

Of course he’d done that. Lando had to admit, he felt a lot safer now that Luke was between him and the shadow, but that didn’t make him feel any better. “You sure you can fight that thing?” he asked quietly. The shadow had assumed a shape that resembled something that one could find on Mon Cala, a writhing center mass of red-lined darkness that sprouted many enormous, twisting tendrils.

“Have to,” Luke said, and he lunged forward just as the shadow did.

In the two years that Lando had been with the Rebellion, he'd experienced the unique agony of watching someone else go into battle while he didn’t, but there was no getting used to it. He watched as Luke weaved in between the shadowy tendrils with unnatural speed. He could tell, in the Force sense, that Luke had wrapped himself in the Force’s power and that it seemed to be keeping the shadow out of his mind, but there was still the physical to worry about. Lando couldn’t stop himself from flinching every time one of those tendrils got too close to Luke.

The shadow, emitting a shriek, suddenly reached around Luke, directing its tendrils at Lando again, but there was a blue presence right next to him, and the shadow was repelled.

Lando wasn’t surprised to see Vader. There were only so many things that could’ve been protecting Artoo earlier. “Thank you,” was all he managed to get out, however, because it was still so utterly strange to find himself on the same side as Darth Vader, and he couldn’t keep his eyes away from Luke for very long.

Luke spun, slicing one of the tendrils clean in half, and the shadow howled in rage, the sound driving through Lando's ears.

“I should be thanking you,” said Vader, his eyes fixed Luke as well. “You saved my son.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t do it for you,” Lando muttered, because he hadn’t forgotten why Cloud City still haunted him.

Luke ducked between several more tendrils, trying unsuccessfully to get at the center of the shadowy mass.

Vader didn’t take offense, though maybe that was because the ghost’s eyes were glued to Luke. He was intently focused, and Lando realized that he was doing something else silently, small vibrations running through his form with the effort. A connection pulsed between father and son; Lando could sense it coiling through the air. Vader was shielding Luke too, Lando realized, though not physically. That was where the power wrapped around Luke was coming from.

Lando bit his lip so hard that it almost bled as Luke narrowly missed being encircled by shadows, sidling around the swirling tendrils at the last second and sliding away from the shadow's grasp. And then both Lando and Vader reacted convulsively, reaching forward uselessly, as the shadow _leapt_ , initiating a massive lunge that brought it close enough to Luke to allow it to strike at him in a way that couldn't be avoided. Lando could _feel_ the enormous strength behind the attack, felt his stomach lurch as a metric ton of Force-driven weight smashed into Luke.

Luke went sprawling, and fear seized Lando's throat, but a small laugh left Vader, full of pride. Lando could hardly understand it, until Luke got his feet under him, with more speed and precision than should have been possible for someone who'd just been hit by the spiritual equivalent of a wall of duracrete. Luke darted forward, his way to the creature's center clear.

He'd purposefully goaded the shadow into hitting him and risked rolling with the blow, thereby coaxing the shadow into moving its center mass closer to him. Lando couldn't sense that intent from Luke, which meant that Vader was doing his job well, but it was easy enough to figure out in hindsight. He could feel the pride radiating from Vader. Lando didn't know whether to laugh as well or to yell at Luke later for scaring the hell out of him.

But Lando's fear was abating, the images of Luke dying that the shadow had tried to imprint on his mind fading as Luke zeroed in on the center of the creature. There was something otherwordly about Luke now, his presence in the Force shining fiercely as his will went up against the shadow's. The real test wasn’t the physical battle; if it was, any particularly skilled Jedi could have killed this thing. The real test was one of spirit, and something had seized Luke, some preternatural drive allowed to flourish now that the shadow couldn't get into his head.

Luke drove his lightsaber into the shadow’s center and locked on, clinging to the hilt with his metal hand as the other hand reached out towards the crystals. The chaotic battle stilled, taking place entirely in willpower, and Lando could feel the power within the crystals straining in two directions, unsure of which call to obey. It was agonizing to watch and even worse to feel, and Lando forgot to breathe.

Then Luke’s fingers bent, and that power was in him.

It was like when they’d first entered the planet’s atmosphere: that same trembling, burning feeling that electrified Lando's skin, that same inhuman look to Luke. He was doing something to the power flowing from the crystals – cutting it off from the shadow on all sides, Lando realized, when the shadow began to shriek in anger, already shrinking. Luke brought his hand back around and pulled the lightsaber out with two hands, only to drive it back into the shadow viciously. The shadow screamed, battering him, but it couldn’t touch him now, as the Force swirled around Luke protectively and possessively in a way that had nothing to do with his father. The shadow was shrinking in size, dissipating with an awful hissing sound as it was cut off from its energy source and mortally wounded by the lightsaber. Luke kept the saber buried in the creature, driving it into the ground, until he couldn’t, until it was nothing more than a pool of living darkness that evaporated with a glass-cracking, teeth-aching wail that Lando knew he’d never be able to forget.

For a moment, Lando saw many flickering figures standing within the cavern, similar in look and hue to Vader and the other Force ghosts. Then they, too, disappeared, and it was as if some great pressure was released with a sigh that trembled across his skin like breath.

And it was over. A deafening silence fell, and Luke sank to his knees next to the crystals, dropping the now-extinguished lightsaber.

Lando stumbled forward and saw Artoo rolling out of the tunnel where the droid had hidden. He was so tired that he didn’t make it to Luke much faster than Artoo, and he dropped to the ground next to Luke gracelessly.

Luke looked at him with such an expression of joy on his face that Lando temporarily forgot how to speak. “Are you alright?” Luke asked at once, and his hands were on Lando’s arms, his eyes roving over Lando in search of injury.

“Yeah,” Lando said breathlessly. He’d been saying that he was fine a lot lately when it wasn’t really true, but right now wasn't entirely a lie, for all that he was exhausted and bruised. He brought his own hands up to support Luke’s shaking form; Luke looked like he was about ten seconds away from collapsing. “Are you?”

Luke nodded, even though he was clearly not. His smile was lopsided and almost disbelieving, and he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. Lando saw hesitation in him, saw where Luke’s eyes focused. With the Force so strong in this place, alive in Luke and in Lando now, with their minds having connected earlier and not entirely shaken that bond, intent flowed between them so obviously that it was impossible to ignore. Lando wasn’t at all surprised when Luke’s hands tightened on his arms, as if to steady himself. “May I?” Luke asked, almost shyly, even though he didn't really need to. 

“Thought you’d never ask,” Lando said and kissed him first.

Lando had been with several people of various genders, but he’d never kissed someone while he could feel the Force swirl around and within them both, resonating with relief and happiness and even pain, all of it that this place had dredged up for them. He’d already begun growing accustomed to the heightened connection that came with the Force, to being aware of so much more, but kissing... it was golden and airy and intimate in a way that felt like his very soul was alight, that eased aches and sang joyously, and it was _definitely_ an experience that he wanted to repeat. He smiled into the kiss and felt Luke smile in turn, and for a moment, nothing hurt.

When Luke broke away, Lando grinned. “Nice of you to finally take the hint,” he said, trying for casual, though Luke was sure to be aware of how fast Lando’s heart was racing.

Luke cringed in embarrassment in between laughter that was relieved and surprised and affectionate at all once, shaking his head. “... I didn’t think you were serious,” he admitted.

“Luke,” said Lando, aware that he wasn't any better nowadays and that it was partially his own fault, “you are planning to run a school.”

Luke brought a hand up to rub at his forehead, chuckling. “It’s not like I’ll be teaching anyone about relationships. At least, I hope not.”

“Good."

“Maybe that should be your job. You could give guest lectures.”

It was such a ridiculous statement that Lando kissed him again, just because.

It was a brief kiss, however, because Artoo beeped at them impatiently, and they broke it off in the realization that they’d forgotten about their surroundings. Lando closed his eyes for a second, as the nature of the situation hit him fully. He tried to wrap his head around the fact that he'd just kissed Darth Vader's son in front of Darth Vader's ghost. He had never, in all of his life, imagined himself doing anything quite like that, and he'd charmed an important son and daughter or three, in the past. His life had never been so strange until Han had come stumbling back into it with Skywalkers in tow. "Is your dad still here?" he muttered, not wanting to look.

"Yeah," said Luke, who looked like he desperately wanted to laugh but was restraining himself for Lando's sake. "Don't worry. He likes you."

Lando had no earthly clue what to say to that, so he climbed tiredly to his feet, using Artoo for support, and pulled Luke up, eyeing Luke's persistent trembling in concern. He was aware of a blue form in his peripheral vision as Vader approached them, and when he glanced in the ghost's direction, Vader's face was pleasantly neutral.

“We should get back,” was the only thing Vader said, and Lando had never thought he’d see the day in which he was genuinely grateful to the man.


	5. Chapter 5

Ghost light and Luke’s senses guided them back through the dark tunnels that crisscrossed the mountain range. The trek was long and slow, and Lando thought that making it without incident must have been solely attributable to some gift of the Force. He and Luke hadn’t really let go of each other, and that was out of necessity. Lando wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them keeled over halfway through, but somehow, they kept stumbling along. Only a few times did they need Artoo's extra support, as the droid followed them closely with an occasional chirp of concern.

Luke spoke as they walked, explaining what had taken place while Lando had been in the shadow’s clutches. It hadn’t been as difficult as Luke had thought it would be to carve into the stone. It was as if the mountains were so steeped in the Force that they gladly responded to the its touch and moved as it willed. Lando thought about the masterful workmanship of interior, at odds with how ancient it seemed to be; perhaps that explained the place.

Of course, Lando also suspected that Luke was downplaying his own ability. After all, he didn’t think that just anyone could have killed that monstrosity.

“So what _was_ that thing?” he asked.

Luke glanced forward at the spirits, who were illuminating the path ahead and talking quietly among themselves. “Yoda said it was a ghost,” he answered. “A corrupted one. The people who lived here, they were Force users, and they summoned it a long time ago.”

“And it killed them,” Lando said softly. It wasn't hard to fill in the blanks. He thought about the figures who had appeared when the shadow had been vanquished and felt a chill run up his spine.

Luke nodded, looking troubled. “I never would have thought it’d be possible to summon a spirit like that,” he said. “Even just manifesting as one was a lost art until recently, and it takes tremendous ability. If I died right now, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

They both jumped a little when Yoda suddenly appeared next to them. “A singular origin of Force users, there is not,” said Yoda. “One of several, this was. Or so we think.”

For a moment, silence rang. “ _Origin?"_ Luke asked faintly.

Yoda nodded. “Lost to time, many arts have been,” he said. “Long and complicated, the history of Force users is.”

Luke frowned. As Yoda returned to the other ghosts after cryptically dropping this information for them, Lando tried to wrap his head around the fact that his team had stumbled across an origin of Force use. That didn't seem like something that would just _happen_. But he didn't know how he felt about the Force meddling with his life like that, because that was the only thing it could have been. He knew better than to believe in coincidence.

He glanced to the side and saw that Luke was still frowning at the ground. Luke’s attention seemed to have left the present entirely, and so Lando didn’t say anything further. He was fast losing the energy for talking, anyway.

By the time they reached the temple city, Lando’s muscles were crying out at the thought of making it back down to the ship as well, but the light from the crystals that dotted the city washed over him and made it seem less like an impossible task. The ghosts vanished without so much as a goodbye, as light was no longer necessary, but he got the sense that their presence wasn't completely gone. He paid it no mind, too concerned with getting to a stopping point. They stumbled through the city, and finally, he and Luke collapsed within the temple, near the crystal that rested at its center. Their supply packs lay there, undisturbed, and Lando had the presence of mind to pull his chronometer out of his.

He stared at it, blinking.

It was afternoon. _Tomorrow_ afternoon. Days were a little longer than galactic standard on this planet, and Lando’s mind tried to make the adjustment. Nine hells. He had no real concept of the time that had passed. It didn't feel like enough. It was hazy, unnatural to think about, like water slipping through his mental fingers, and it was different from the way that it had sometimes felt since the war, when the days seemed to blur together.

“The shadow,” said Luke, who was peering over Lando’s shoulder. “It was distorting time as much as space. That shouldn’t happen again, now that it’s gone.”

Lando was more concerned with the fact that neither of them had eaten for more than a full day. But no rush of intensified hunger hit him alongside the realization. He _was_ hungry, but it was more like half a day’s worth, and it wasn't the same lack of appetite he'd been having for a while now. He glanced at the towering crystal that lit the room, feeling its light sink into him and rejuvenate him enough that he didn't want to pass out then and there, and wondered.

They ate, and with food and Force energy restoring some of their strength to them, they made their way out of the city and up the stairs, which Lando found a newfound loathing for as a malicious architectural invention meant to torment tired people. But they made it in good time, even though it took some extra effort to get Artoo up the stairs as well. Lando was fairly sure that Artoo's many irritated beeps were about the injustice of places not designed for droids with rolling treads.

It was a relief to get to the tunnel that would lead them out of the mountains, and Luke brought out his saber for light. However, an odd sound reached them almost at once, and it grew into a tremendous, amplified roaring that echoed down the tunnel, distorted enough that lightsaber and blaster were ready before they worked out what it was.

“It’s a storm,” Lando said after a moment, re-holstering his blaster.

And so it was. As soon as the entrance came into view, they stopped, watching the chaos unfold ahead, and Lando noticed that Luke's eyes held as much fascination as dismay. Sheets of rain were hurled sideways, interspersed with silver-white flashes, and the wind howled miserably, overlaid with the rhythmic rumble of thunder that seemed to shake even the stone beneath their feet. It was the kind of sudden and fierce afternoon thunderstorm that mountains were known for, though, like everything else here, it seemed bigger than Lando remembered elsewhere.

“I knew this planet was too good to be true,” he said.

Luke laughed, a weak sound. He was drooping against Lando’s side, as if the presence of the storm had taken much of what was left of his strength out of him. “Guess we’ll have to wait it out.”

“Not here,” said Lando. “Cave openings, they channel electricity. That lightning can find its way in here easy enough.” He felt Luke tense against him.

They retreated to the edge of the temple city once more. Going back down the stairs was out of the question, so they stopped at the top. Lando had been looking forward to getting back to the familiarity of the _Falcon_ , but as he settled with his back against the part of the wall where the tunnel opened up, with Luke and Artoo beside him, he had to admit that this wasn’t too bad. The magnificent sight of the temple city was in plain view, and the light of the crystals danced continuously over the walls. The warmth of their presence seeped all the way down to Lando’s core and made his aches hurt just a little less. And then Luke leaned into him, his head dipping down in sheer exhaustion to rest against Lando’s shoulder, and Lando found that he was more than okay with hanging around here for a while.

Lando moved his left arm, shifting it so that he could wrap it around Luke’s shoulders, and Luke responded by pressing himself closer. Lando smiled and then, somewhat impulsively, reached around to rest his free hand on Luke’s prosthetic, which was fidgeting on top of Luke’s knee. Luke stiffened, an undercurrent of surprise palpable in the air, and for a moment, Lando feared that he had overstepped and misjudged Luke’s level of comfort with the hand.

But Luke relaxed, tangling his metal fingers with Lando’s. “Thank you,” he said abruptly, and Lando could hear sleep trickling into his voice, “for saving me. I don’t know what would have happened to me if you hadn’t been here. Thanks for not listening to me.”

Lando huffed. “I would’ve been dead without my Jedi Knight,” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I was just looking out for myself, like you wanted.”

Luke smiled into his shoulder, his eyes half-closed. He was slipping away quickly, the battle and the fact that he never seemed to sleep catching up to him, and Lando didn’t say anything further, wanting to speed the process along so that Luke would sleep for once. But Luke roused himself, because as usual he had something to say. “I think you should go back to Cloud City,” he said, as seriously as someone who was already half-asleep could.

Lando wasn’t surprised that Luke had brought it up. It had lingered in his thoughts ever since this planet had decided to bring bad memories to the forefront, and he had a feeling that Luke had sensed some things when their minds had connected. “Hmm,” Lando said noncommittally. Not because he disagreed, but because he needed time to think.

It seemed like Luke wanted to continue the conversation, but his body was giving up at last, and he was fast asleep before he could get any more words out. It meant that Lando would have plenty of time to think without distraction. The sight of Luke napping against his shoulder was plenty distracting, however, so Lando tore his eyes away and looked out over the city instead. Without the shadow's influence hanging over it, its ancient magnificence seemed friendlier. Still lonely, still sad, but less overwhelming and more inviting.

He only just managed to keep himself from starting and disturbing Luke when the three ghosts shimmered into existence once more, standing before him.

Lando looked up at them, narrowing his eyes as he finally had a real chance to consider them. He’d never met Luke’s mentors in life, but Luke had described them to him once, and of course, Lando had only ever met Vader as an enemy before this. Luke bore none of them ill will, even though his mentors had lied to him and Lando privately felt that their teaching methods had been questionable at best. But that was Luke. Lando would follow suit for his sake. Besides, it was only because of the ghosts’ help that he and Luke had survived this at all.

Vader had the hint of a smile on his face. What had Luke said his name was? Anakin. Lando tried to think of him that way, as Luke’s father, and it wasn’t as hard as he'd thought it would be, when the ghost’s affection for Luke was more than evident. That, at least, was something to which Lando could relate.

“You need not worry about keeping watch,” Obi-Wan said, speaking quietly and offering Lando a nod. “There isn’t anything left on this planet that could be a threat.”

So that was where they'd gone. Lando believed him and knew that the ghosts and the droid would be keeping an eye out, but despite his aches and fatigue, he didn't think he could sleep here. He nodded in turn. “Thanks for helping us out,” he said, keeping his voice low. He had to admit, he was more than curious about them. A few years ago, he would have scoffed at the idea of ghosts existing, either in the form before him or in the form of the shadow, and yet here they were.

The ghosts silently acknowledged his thanks, and Lando realized that they were looking at him in similar curiosity. He wondered if it had something to do with the fact that Luke was curled up against him. Jedi had foregone relationships, Lando remembered. Well… most of them, he thought, looking at Anakin. Lando knew that Luke didn’t particularly care about that tradition and wasn’t planning on bringing it back, and he resisted the urge to pull Luke closer to him. “If you’re here to lecture him,” he said frankly, “you can forget it.” He didn’t feel the need to clarify what he meant. He was sure that his feelings were transmitting quite clearly through the Force.

To his surprise, Yoda snorted. “What he wants, Luke does,” he said, shaking his head, and Lando couldn't help but wonder if death made someone less uptight. He certainly hadn't expected this from the way that Luke had described his mentors. “Learned that some time ago, we did.”

“Rather like another Jedi I could name,” Obi-Wan said dryly, not bothering to hide his glance at Anakin.

“Please don't insult my son,” Anakin said, just as dry.

There was an ease between them that surprised Lando. Whatever history existed there, it seemed to have been resolved, for the most part. Anakin stood a little apart from the other two, but Lando realized that it was because he seemed intent on speaking to Lando. Anakin glanced at the other ghosts.

“Patrol, we should,” said Yoda. “Double check for any danger.”

“We could have missed something,” Obi-Wan agreed.

They nodded to Lando and vanished without further ado, because eccentricity seemed to be Jedi tradition as well.

Anakin remained, trading in his smile for a frown as he avoided meeting Lando's gaze directly. He didn’t speak for a few moments, and neither did Lando.

“It doesn’t make up for anything,” said Anakin, finally making eye contact, “but for what it’s worth… I am sorry.”

Lando had expected it. He stared at the ghost, once again struck by how surreal this all was. Not so long ago, the last thing he would have expected was an apology from Darth Vader, let alone his ghost. When faced with it, Lando found that he wasn’t even sure how to respond. He didn’t think he could outright forgive the man, not like Luke had. Luke had needed his father, and Lando had no such needs. But he wasn’t particularly inclined towards an outstanding grudge, either. He didn’t think that they would ever be especially friendly, if they even saw each other much after this, but he could settle for cordiality. There was sincerity in Anakin’s demeanor; Lando didn’t think he was apologizing only because of Luke.

“It’s worth a fair bit, I’d say," Lando responded at last. It was neither forgiveness nor condemnation, but an acknowledgement that Anakin’s presence did have some significant impact on him that wasn’t wholly unwelcome, considering where Lando had chosen to place his affections. And that was all he wanted to say on the matter. He preferred things to be a done deal once an accord was reached, and he didn’t think he could stomach any more of this subject. Much of what Anakin had done wasn’t even Lando’s to forgive, after all.

Anakin took the hint from Lando’s tone, which didn’t invite any further discussion of the topic. The ghost offered a small nod. “And for what it’s worth,” said Anakin, his face softer than Lando could have ever imagined Vader’s to be, “I’m glad he has you.”

Lando’s breath caught somewhere in his throat, and he blinked, taken aback. It was a little irksome to know that a compliment from the man could catch him off guard and actually feel good. “So am I,” he said after a few moments of gathering his wits back, because he wasn’t going to let Anakin know that it had affected him.

Anakin, who wore the faintest of smiles again, seemed to know regardless.

* * *

Lando couldn’t actually sleep until they were back on the _Falcon._  They reached it after evening had well and truly settled over this part of this planet, and the sight of the familiar ship amidst shadowy trees and under the growing starlight was so welcome that Lando's knees threatened to give out in relief. The ghosts had long since disappeared from his sight, though Lando suspected that they weren't gone, based on how Luke's eyes moved. It seemed, however, that Lando's eyes were only able to perceive them within the mountains themselves. But he knew that they were keeping watch, along with Artoo's vigilant scans, and so he thought nothing of crashing into his bunk without even a security check.

He slept so soundly through the night that waking up the next morning was a bit disorienting. It was the most restful sleep he’d gotten in a while, and maybe that had something to do with the fact that Luke had been entangled with him in the same bunk. They hadn't really said anything about the arrangement; it had just happened, as naturally as if had been going on for a while.

When Lando awoke, Luke was gone, but Lando followed the smell of food and found Luke in the galley. Lando was suddenly aware of how his hunger seemed have tripled from what it had been under the mountains, and he gladly accepted the plate and drink that Luke handed to him. He made his way around the corridor to the dejarik table and saw Artoo planted in a nearby corner running some kind of scan. Lando sat, and half of the rations were gone before he was quite aware that he’d eaten that much. It was a change, not just from earlier, but from the past year; he hadn't felt this hungry a while.

Luke appeared a few moments later and sat down across from him with only a drink.

“So,” said Lando, “what did you mean, you didn’t think I was serious? Have I lost my touch?”

It was amusing how easily he could fluster Luke, when he’d watched the man grow from someone who’d been more than a little in over his head into the quiet, confident Jedi who sat before him. Luke grimaced in discomfiture. “I don’t know…” he said. “I was just being self-deprecating, I guess. It wasn’t anything you did.”

Lando was surprised at the honesty of the admission, and he frowned, putting his fork down. He was no better; Luke was so often distracted and a little bit sad, carrying with him a distance that came from walking a path that no one else did, and Lando hadn’t read any interest in that, mostly because he hadn’t been expecting to find anything there. There was a reason why his only romantic dalliances lately had been very brief and temporary and free of commitment. Lando sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too. I know I should have said something.” Something more than silly flirting followed by a swift exit, anyway. He took a sip of his drink. “We’re a mess.”

“Now we have something in common," Luke said with a hidden smile.

Lando thought about Death Stars and cities in the clouds and smiled, too.

Luke was eyeing him curiously, hesitantly. “So… we _are_ doing this? I don’t want to assume…”

Lando hadn’t realized that making out with someone after they’d killed a great beast and then sharing a bed was unclear. But Luke was a very direct person, so Lando set his drink aside and said, gently, “I would very much like it if you would go out with me in a romantic fashion.” He paused, and then his voice dried out. “Do you want that in writing?”

Luke laughed again, and Lando was glad of his ability to draw that out of him so easily. And Luke kept laughing, a small sound with an edge of tired mania. “Han’s going to have a fit.”

The thought had Lando bursting into laughter. He could just picture Han’s dumbfounded face. “He’ll get over it." It had been far too long since they’d been together for any lingering pain – Han was happy with Leia, and Lando was happy for both of them, and he knew the feeling would be reciprocated. But Han was also very protective of Luke. Leia was, too, and she was the scary one. Lando fully expected at least one thinly veiled threat that he'd better take his relationship with Luke very seriously or else.

But Lando wasn’t planning on anything less.

When he’d cleaned off his plate, he pushed it aside and leaned on the table. “So,” he said, “what’s the plan for today?”

To his surprise, Luke became subdued; it wasn’t quite in his posture or expression, but in something that Lando could sense. Luke gestured to his astromech, who was still occupied. “I’ve been having Artoo run diagnostic scans on the data he gathered from the mountains. You should have a full list of usable materials soon.”

Lando nodded his thanks, touched that Luke had already started doing that work for him. He stared at Luke for a moment, trying to figure out what was bothering him. “We can fly over the mountain ranges,” he said casually, “see if we can get a working map of the tunnels from surface scans.”

Luke agreed. “I want to take a look at those crystals again, too. If we can figure out how to use them for energy, then you shouldn’t have to worry about getting utility contractors out here.”

“ _I_  shouldn't?” Realization arrived, and Lando frowned. Surely that wasn’t where Luke was heading. “What about you?”

Luke wouldn’t meet his gaze, looking down at the floor.

“Luke,” Lando said sternly.

Luke sighed, shaking his head. “You faced the shadow,” he said quietly. “You felt it. All the lives it took.” Lando remembered the sinking feeling of despair that the shadow had induced, heavy with the weight of misery that had not been entirely his. He repressed a shiver as Luke continued. “I couldn’t bring myself to put a school on top of any of the Jedi temples. They’re graves, now. It just felt wrong. But this place, it’s a grave too.”

Lando was silent for a while, weighing this. He could see where Luke was coming from, but something about it didn’t ring true to him. “I did _not_ just almost die for nothing,” he said lightly.

Luke smiled half-heartedly. “It wasn’t for nothing. You’re going to get a lot out of those mountains, mining-wise.”

“What, and set up shop here all by myself?” Lando asked. “Luke, the Jedi only died a few decades ago. I understand if that feels too close. But this place has been empty for a long time. Something tells me its people would be glad about it getting use again.”

Luke absorbed this, his eyes still on the floor, and he didn't speak for several seconds as he weighed Lando's words against whatever was tearing at him inside. Finally, he looked back at Lando, and his serious expression was undercut by the sarcasm in his tone. “Are you sensing that?”

Lando smirked. “I know how to use the Force now.”

“Now? I don’t know, Lando, I don’t think that Death Star shot could’ve been made by just anybody.”

Lando waved a dismissive hand at him. “Oh no. No. I’m normal, thank you very much.” They lapsed into thoughtful silence, and then Lando moved a little closer, tilting his head to regard Luke earnestly. “I have a good feeling about this place, and I know you do too. You’re not going to find a better location. And I think you were meant to find it, with the way my team did.”

Luke’s lips quirked up. "The Force wanted _you_ to find it, you mean. I'm telling you..."

“Shut up,” Lando told him, laughing. “Not another word. I like being normal.” His laughter tapered off, and he gave Luke a sympathetic smile. “At this point,” he said, “you’re just stalling.” He said it with certainty, because the two of them were a mess in many of the same ways, and Luke hadn't been the only one to see the turmoil in someone else's mind. Lando's senses had brushed up against Luke's fears, too, when they'd connected through the Force - fears of being unable to carry the weight that had been placed on his shoulders. It was no wonder that Luke couldn't settle on a location when a location meant setting the foundation of the future he wanted.

But this vibrant place, which let Luke commune with Force ghosts and which traced its roots back to Force users that predated even the Jedi... if its reappearance wasn't a good sign, what was?

Luke sighed, slumping in his seat. “I am.” Then he glanced up. “I’m not the only one.”

“I know,” Lando acknowledged. It had been in his mind ever since Luke had fallen asleep on his shoulder, since Luke had zeroed in on it the night before. “I’ve been thinking about that, actually.” Lando took a breath. “You asked me why I didn’t go back to Cloud City.”

Luke’s attention was focused on him. “You gave me some bantha shit non-answer,” he said, but his voice was teasing.

“I’m known for being good at that,” Lando admitted. He didn’t really know how to explain that going back now, at least on a permanent basis, would’ve felt like slipping on an alien skin, one that didn’t fit him anymore. Maybe he'd be able to handle the guilt of failing it before, but he didn’t know how to handle being a different person walking into a place a past self had walked. He knew Luke would understand – the man had been much the same on Tatooine and had avoided talking about it. Lando shared that sentiment and forged on. “I’m thinking, Baron Administrator just isn’t enough for me.”

Luke grinned. “I see Endor didn’t make your head too big.”

“Speak for yourself, _Jedi Knight_ ,” Lando said, chuckling. “I’m thinking of setting up a shipping network.”

Luke shifted in his seat, intrigued. “Mining-related?”

Lando nodded. “Not just that, hopefully, but it's a good place to start. Would cost a bit to get off the ground, but if this planet works out, then I don’t have to spend too much time building up enough of a profit to get it started. I’d have a base with no other claim, and I already have another source. A friend of mine is running Cloud City now.”

He paused, reflecting on the other reason why he hadn’t wanted to return to Cloud City in the same official capacity as before. Lobot had always managed the affairs of Cloud City well as Lando's right hand, and after leading the effort to take it back from the Imperials during the Uprising, Lobot had found himself in charge of its new council of representatives by the will of the people. It was a good position for him, and Lando wasn’t keen on taking that, even though he knew Lobot would let him if he asked. Besides, it _was_ about time he started thinking bigger.

“I think he’d be interested in partnering with me," Lando continued, "and you are, of course, and there are other locations that are still up for grabs and looking for long-term deals now that the Imperials are gone, if I move fast enough. Calrissian Enterprises. There’s a lot of money in shipping, you know.” Lando almost laughed at the thought of heading legal supply transport after his years of smuggling.

Luke took a few moments to consider all that Lando had said, and his eyes were shining, the melancholy from earlier not as prominent. “Sounds brilliant,” he said, and then smiled. “Guess that means we’d be seeing a lot of each other.”

He wanted to set up here, then. Lando relaxed. He hadn't wanted to push Luke too much, if Luke truly didn't want this place, even though a lot of its appeal came from the fact that they could share it. “A shame, really,” he said merrily. “You’d have to put up with my big head.”

“Only if you could put up with mine," Luke laughed.

Lando was feeling enthused, more so than he had in a long time. It felt better to have a singular goal in mind, one that gave him a chance to reconnect with Lobot and spend time with Luke. It would let him continue to assist the New Republic, if he could successfully get it off the ground; the galaxy was still fractured with tension and uncertainty, and more stable supply lines, especially to places still suffering from the ravages of the war, would perhaps ease some of that. And it would let him stay on the move a little more so than permanently resettling in Cloud City would. Lando didn't know if this restlessness leftover from the war would ever leave him, but maybe it wouldn't chase at his heels so much if he left it an outlet.

He knew that committing to this goal would not be as easy as planning to, but he had to try. Maybe he and Luke could keep each other in check. Keep each other from stalling instead of acting.

The only thing that remained uncertain was jurisdiction laws, as galactic law wasn’t fully hammered out after the toppling of the Empire. The new Senate certainly took their time, a fact which he’d heard Leia rail about often, and there was a push to strengthen the legitimacy and power of the galaxy’s many systems, rather than concentrating it so much in a central power. It meant that they weren’t quite sure what would happen to an unclaimed planet in a sector that technically wasn’t under anyone’s control, but Lando had a feeling that Leia would strong-arm whoever and whatever she had to in order to make sure this planet was put into her brother’s hands.

He hoped she'd be able to. This planet thrummed with power, and Lando didn’t like to think of that in anyone’s hands but Luke’s.

Artoo chirped, signaling that he'd finished running his scans, and the droid rolled up to Lando with a list on display. Lando skimmed through it, already beginning to calculate the logistics of the materials that this planet could offer. He rested a brief hand on Artoo's dome. "Thanks, buddy," he said, and Artoo trilled.

Still, Lando didn't want to think about logistics or jurisdiction or the like right now. They’d had a victory, and they deserved to enjoy it for a moment. He glanced at Luke, who seemed lost in thought, and sidled across the seat and around the dejarik table. "You're sure about this place?" Lando asked, coming to sit next to him. Not that he wanted Luke to change his mind, but he wanted it to be genuine.

Luke nodded slowly. "I'll be looking for information and artifacts until I'm old and gray," he said. "But I can't start looking for people without somewhere to bring them. And I can't keep putting that off. Force knows the paperwork will probably take a year. Plenty of time to change my mind if I get cold feet." He smiled then, glancing at Lando and tilting his head to bring their faces closer together. "Somehow I doubt that, though."

"This planet is sure to be interesting," Lando agreed, and Luke didn't give him time to say anything further before pulling him in. This wasn't a 'thank the Force we're alive' kiss. It was softer, full of anticipation of the things that one could do when one was alive. And even though the sense of the Force was dimmed this far from the mountain range and didn't sing with strength around and within them as it had before, Lando thought that this was just as good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This last part took me a while to finish because real life is kicking my ass, and in the meantime, a new canon book, Aftermath: Empire's End, came out with some stuff about Lando taking Bespin back pretty soon after ROTJ. Most of this is incompatible with canon, actually, but SW has one of those canons that's sometimes best ignored anyway.


End file.
